Railing design with Railing Tool

[Red]

Unless I have overlooked a way to make this happen with the Railing Tool, this design doesn't seem possible with the Tool. Please correct me if I am wrong. The example below was changed by the customer for savings, but it still shows the overlook I want. We originally designed it with a 4x6 main post with a 6x6 post at the corners. They obviously went with all 4x4 post and offset them on the corners. Anyway, the issue I have is getting the inner post ( the sandwiched vertical 2x4s) to set no more than 4" (Typ dimension it at 3 15/16" for C.Y.A. reason) in from the main post. I never tried the wire yet, but I figured it would be fairly simple to create with the Tool with balusters.

So, am I missing something that will make those inner set in place?

[Lingwisyer]

Personally, I would script a custom panel. If your post distancing is consistent, you could also be lazy and just save out one from the floor plan. Regarding the wiring, is there any need to actually model them over using a texture with alpha?



Ling.

[Barry Kelly]

What you have labeled as inner post are not.
The long post is an inner post.
Unless you are going to add a node along the length of your railing at the point of each of those long posts.
Normally you would only have nodes at the ends/corners of the railing.

You could create a custom inner post consisting of the long post with a shorter infill post on each side.
So effectively the 3 posts become one.

Create I custom corner post as well but with only one short infill post (I didn't do that.

Then add an infill panel and use a material for the wire with an alpha channel image to save trying to create a custom wire panel that probably wont stretch all that well (I didn't do that either - just used plain glass).


A bit like this ( I haven't set the horizontal rails properly either - just a quick 2 minute proof of concept) ...


Barry.

[Laszlo Nagy]

The inner post arrangement is possible to do in a different way as well, as you can see on my attached screenshot:


There are a few points that are worth making about how this can be done:

1. The most important one is that it is possible to have more than one Inner Post within a single Railing Segment as you can see on the above screenshot. You switch to the "Inner Post" page of the Dialog, and with the use of the "+" button in the top right corner of the preview area, you can add multiple Inner Posts. Archicad will always take the rightmost of the placed Inner Posts and consider that to be the right edge of the Segment.

2. When specifying the position of the individual Inner Posts, it is possible to lock their distance to a specified value from the left edge of the Segment/Inner Post to their left by clicking on the LOCK icon to the right of the "Distance to Previous" field. In this example, we have 3 Inner Posts. If you lock the "Distance to previous" value for the first and third and set them to the same value, you can achieve the symmetrical look shown on Red's image.


3. You can also define the top and bottom of Inner Posts relative to Rail 1 and Rail 2, which are the upper and lower boundaries of the first and second Inner Posts on Red's image.


4. Regarding the Panel, I, too, would probably create a custom GDL panel, that consists of that grid or net, with its thickness, width and height, plus X and Y offsets for starting position of the grid as parameters. Or, Barry's image panel suggestion would also work.

[Lingwisyer]

Multiple inner post types, completely overlooked that...

[Barry Kelly]

Lingwisyer wrote:
Multiple inner post types, completely overlooked that...

Yes.
I knew we can have multiple rail, handrails and balusters.
I didn't even think of multiple inner posts.
There is that consistency we are always asking for.

That suggestion of Laszlo's is better than a custom post as the individual post heights can be controlled by the rail heights rather than as one custom post.


Barry.

[Red]

Thank you both, this has been helpful.

[Red]

I was using the rail tool in the wrong way, I think... I was not placing nodes at all main posts until yesterday. After noticing the railing works better that way I took that approach in the rail tool as well. I was originally laying it out corner to corner. I suppose it can be used in either method depending on the rail style.

[Barry Kelly]

Corner to corner is the 'proper' method.
Adding extra nodes just gives you more (different) control.
So each post becomes a 'node' post rather than an 'inner' post.

Same but different.


Barry.