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Making Oval Handrail ?

Anonymous
Not applicable
Would rather not spend time tweeking the stair maker tool as it hasn't been that productive in the past.

any hints on how to model a handrail for an oval stair, as shown attachement?

Perhaps a 2D profile applied to a primitive form?

Will appreciate any ideas/suggestions.
Thanks,
Cedric Araica

oval-stair-1.jpg
36 REPLIES 36
Anonymous
Not applicable
Cedric,
By coincidence, I very recently modeled a stair and railing very similar
to the one you are showing.
StairMaker would not make the stair I needed so I had to model
the treads and risers using slabs.
I modeled the hand rail with volutes with the mesh tool.
Peter Devlin
TomWaltz
Participant
I modeled the hand rail with volutes with the mesh tool.
Really? How hard was that to do?
Tom Waltz
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=3350&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=...

I think you can do it with the profiler tool just fine.

ArchiCAD 25 7000 USA - Windows 10 Pro 64x - Dell 7720 64 GB 2400MHz ECC - Xeon E3 1535M v6 4.20GHz - (2) 1TB M.2 PCIe Class 50 SSD's - 17.3" UHD IPS (3840x2160) - Nvidia Quadro P5000 16GB GDDR5 - Maxwell Studio/Render 5.2.1.49- Multilight 2 - Adobe Acrobat Pro - ArchiCAD 6 -25

TomWaltz
Participant
Steve wrote:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=3350&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=...

I think you can do it with the profiler tool just fine.
Profiler won't do this. It is only for "flat" objects. It cannot go upward like a stair railing would need to.... unless you mean the CADImage 3D Profiler? Even that would be pretty difficult to curve around in plan like the example shows.
Tom Waltz
Anonymous
Not applicable
Tom,
It wasn't that hard.
I drew the handrail top view and then used the magic wand
to trace it as a mesh. I gave the mesh skirt the elevation of
the lower volute from the floor, inserted pairs of edge nodes
at regular intervals along the path of the handrail and then
assigned each pair of nodes an elevation.
Peter Devlin
TomWaltz wrote:
Profiler won't do this. It is only for "flat" objects. It cannot go upward like a stair railing would need to.... unless you mean the CADImage 3D Profiler? Even that would be pretty difficult to curve around in plan like the example shows.
Do I need to post the pictures again? go the the link and see for your self. I can make an oval hand rail that comes down the strair, turns the corner and goes on down.

ArchiCAD 25 7000 USA - Windows 10 Pro 64x - Dell 7720 64 GB 2400MHz ECC - Xeon E3 1535M v6 4.20GHz - (2) 1TB M.2 PCIe Class 50 SSD's - 17.3" UHD IPS (3840x2160) - Nvidia Quadro P5000 16GB GDDR5 - Maxwell Studio/Render 5.2.1.49- Multilight 2 - Adobe Acrobat Pro - ArchiCAD 6 -25

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/download.php?id=1370

This is a simple version of a oval hand rail I made with the profiler tool
because someone else said you can't do it. I love it when people say that. My answer is always the same....sure you can, its just a little tricky thats all.

ArchiCAD 25 7000 USA - Windows 10 Pro 64x - Dell 7720 64 GB 2400MHz ECC - Xeon E3 1535M v6 4.20GHz - (2) 1TB M.2 PCIe Class 50 SSD's - 17.3" UHD IPS (3840x2160) - Nvidia Quadro P5000 16GB GDDR5 - Maxwell Studio/Render 5.2.1.49- Multilight 2 - Adobe Acrobat Pro - ArchiCAD 6 -25

TomWaltz
Participant
Steve wrote:
TomWaltz wrote:

Profiler won't do this. It is only for "flat" objects. It cannot go upward like a stair railing would need to.... unless you mean the CADImage 3D Profiler? Even that would be pretty difficult to curve around in plan like the example shows.


Do I need to post the pictures again? go the the link and see for your self. I can make an oval hand rail that comes down the stair, turns the corner and goes on down.


I looked at your link, and it did not seem to apply to Cedric's actual situation. There is a huge difference between the pair of straight-run stairs you show and the spiral stair shown in Cedric's example. The question was not how to do an oval-profile handrail, but an how to put a handrail on an oval-shaped stair (as shown in the example plan).

True, you technically CAN do some sloping elements with Profiler, if you have a lot of time to spend on doing it. Cedric said he was interested in time, and if Stairmaker was not productive for this in the past, I'm betting the "can be done with substantial effort and zero ability to be edited without repeating the process from the top" won't be too time-effective either.

There is a difference between "can be done" and "can be done quickly." I think Peter's Mesh method would be probably not be much faster in the beginning but will have the ability to be quickly edited later if/when the need arose. That can carry a lot of weight, since the whole point of CAD should be the ability to make quick revisions, not to start over from scratch any time a change is made. At some point, should we at least TRY to be efficient? At some point, in some situation, is the model so inefficient that it's faster to just draw something in 2D?

I think the CADImage 3D profiler might work well for this too, but I could not say for sure. I've used it a lot, but not for this kind of oval-plan condition. It can be a little tricky sometimes, and may cause more problems than it solves.
Tom Waltz
TomWaltz
Participant
Cedric wrote:
Would rather not spend time tweeking the stair maker tool as it hasn't been that productive in the past.

any hints on how to model a handrail for an oval stair, as shown attachement?
Cedric,

I'm kind of curious.... is that a stair "made from selected hatch"? That's a little more complicated than the typical Stairmaker stair!
Tom Waltz