5 Ways to Create SPIRAL STAIRS IN SKETCHUP

what's up guys Justin here with the sketchup' essentials comm back with another Sketchup quick tutorial for you so in this video last week we talked about creating some straight stairs and the ways to do that and Sketchup now I'm going to talk about a few ways to create some spiral staircases before I get started today's video is brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course the Sketchup essentials course is a course I put together to basically give people a quick easy way to get started with Sketchup it's basically the equivalent of a two-day in-person introduction to Sketchup course so if you want to learn how to use Sketchup fast get into some things like basic tools and then getting into more advanced methods modeling for layout interior design I'm an introduction to photorealistic rendering if you're interested in all of that you want to get some more training make sure you check out the Sketchup essentials comm slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so let's start off with the most simple method which is basically creating a circle and then creating a series of wedges and so the way that you're going to do this is you're gonna create a circle and you're gonna set the number of sides in it to the number of steps that you'd like so in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna activate the circle tool by tapping the C key and then I'm gonna type in a value of 12 so and hit the enter key what that's gonna do is that's going to create a 12 sided circle and then I'm gonna click once to set my center point and I'm gonna type in a radius value and my radius value is gonna be whatever I want the width of my stairs to be so in this case my radius value is gonna be 4 feet so I'm gonna type in 4 feet and I'm gonna hit the enter key and what that's gonna do is that's gonna create a circle that's 8 feet in diameter 4 feet wide and then what we're gonna do is we're just gonna draw a line from the center to the edge of two of these points so you can see how this drew a circle that was made up of 12 segments and so once we've done this what we can do is we can come in and erase out the rest of our circle and well and now we're gonna take this step and we're gonna extrude it into 3d using the push-pull tool so I'm just going to tap that P key then click on this face and I'm going to give this a distance we'll call it 4 inches we'll call it a 4 inch rise and then we're just going to write or we're just gonna select this wedge right click on it we're make it a component and you can call it something like spiral stair tread or something like that and then make sure the box for replaced selection with component is checked and click the button for create and so once you've created that what you have is you have this wedge shape and so now we're gonna come in here and we're gonna create a series of copies using this wedge so I'm just going to use the rotate tool so I'm going to tap the Q key to activate that tool then I'm gonna put my mouse over the center point and I'm going to come out and click here and then I'm going to tap the control key to activate copy mode and then I'm going to click right here so you can see how that creates a copy right here and then all you have to do is type in times 11 and hit the enter key and that'll create 11 copies of this circle or this wedge so you can see how I have a series of copies of this wedge right now well now all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make a bunch of copies of this whole thing using the move tool and copy mode so I'm gonna select this whole thing I'm going to tap the M key to activate the move tool then I'm gonna click once on this point and I'm gonna tap the control key to activate copy mode and I'm just going to move my mouse up to this point right here and in this case I'm just gonna type in times 11 again and hit the inner key and I realize that this isn't giving us a very our step with here probably isn't very precise in this case so you can kind of mess around with that but in this case for this example it ought to be good enough and so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna come in here and we're just gonna do a shift click and we're gonna select all of the wedges that would go up in a stair-stepping fashion so you can see how I'm just going up one and over one and I'm just holding that shift key and I'm just clicking on the different wedges and so you can see how now I've selected this all in a circle well now you're just gonna hold the shift key down you can see how I get the little plus minus sign next to my mouse and I'm gonna click and drag a box across this and what that's gonna do is that's gonna deselect the stairs that I had selected and it's gonna select everything else and then I can just hit the Delete key and so you can see how when I hit the delete what that did is that deleted out all that extra stuff and so in this case probably what I'm going to do and so then all you do is you could just come in here and you could just create a line up for your handrail and actually I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna adjust the spacing in here a little bit because I don't really like this so I'm actually gonna go back and when I create my initial copy so I just did a bunch of undos they're probably what I'm gonna do is instead of moving this so that it's this point right here I'm probably gonna do it so that the step up is actually eight inches so I'm doing that same thing and I'm gonna type in times eleven that creates eleven copies all what that's doing is that's just creating the same thing but with more spacing between your steps and you can kind of mess around with this you don't necessarily have to do it exactly the way that I did it I'm just trying to get a little bit more realistic spacing on my spiral stairs so then we'll do the same thing hold the shift key and drag across this there we go and so you can see what that did is that actually gave me some spacing between my steps so and like I said you can do this either way if you want to so if you decide for example that you don't want this gap in here that's fine you just need to make sure that the number of steps that you have in here works for that so you're just gonna have to kind of work some stuff out when you do that but then what you can do is you can come in here and you can just draw a handrail and we'll just arbitrarily pick a point right now and so we'll just draw a line that's three foot up and then all you have to do is draw another line to the next point and you can see how since these are all components this adds this all in here like this so that gives you a path that you could use like pipe along path or something like that to extrude to extrude something along and if you wanted to you could also come in here and you could create like a center post so if you wanted this to be a spiral staircase where everything just comes off of this post you could just draw a circle right here and extrude that up alright so method two is very similar to method 1 so I'm gonna make this twenty four sided circle in this case but what we're gonna do this time is we're actually going to draw two circles instead of one so in this case I'm going to draw a 10-foot circle and then I'm gonna kind of inference back to the center point and along this same path I'm gonna draw a six-foot circle and so we're gonna do the same thing we did before with the wedges but instead of having these come to the center like we did before we're going to use the points on these circles to generate our wedge and so the one thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna come in this circle and I think before you draw these lines in here you have to do this but I'm gonna come in this circle I'm gonna click on the edge and then I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna use the option for find Center and so when you select on this line that makes up the circle this will put a guide point in here at the center so we can use that in a second in order to create there in order to rotate our stairs so now what I can do is I can erase out these circles because I have this Center point that I can use and so then we'll just do the same thing or we'll just make this a tread and in this case we'll make this one go up we'll call this one six inches and we're just going to do the same thing where you use the rotate tool and copy mode to create this copy and in this case I'm going to create a series of copies the same way that we did in the last example and then we're just gonna select this well deselect this guide because we don't want to make a bunch of copies of the guide and we'll just use the Move tool and copy mode to copy this up so in this case I'll copy this up twenty four times and so you can see how this gives us that full circle and then we'll do the same thing where we hold the shift key and drag a box across this and then we'll delete out our extra so you can see how this gives us a wider spiral staircase then you can do the same thing where you can come in here and you can just draw your line up in order to get kind of your guide point so in this case the only thing that you might do a little bit different is you might do this on both sides so you can see how that can be used to create more of a wider more circular spiral stair so the next method is the first method we're going to use that uses an extension and so I'm going to use an extension called memory copy to create a series of copies over and over again and so in order to do that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stick with this twenty four sided circle I think and we'll do the same thing that we did in the original spiral stair I'm just to make this easy so probably what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm gonna make this five feet and then we'll do the same thing where we'll use the center point and what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm going to draw one foot line out just so that this doesn't go all the way into the center and then we can do the same thing or we can erase out our circle and so I'm just gonna push pull this up we'll call this four inches again we'll select all of this and we'll make it a component and then in this case because we're gonna use the memory copy extension which I'll link to in the notes down below all we have to do is create one copy so we'll use the rotate tool in copy mode to make a copy right here and then we'll move this up so that it's kind of in line and then all you have to do is you can right-click on this point or on this component and there's going to be an option down here called play it again and what the plate what the play it again option is going to do is that's going to let you repeat movement on a component so that's what memory copy does so in this case we'd click on play it again with this with this component selected and then we just click on this one over and over and over again and what that's going to do is that's going to repeat this as many times as we click on it so I could click sit here and click on this all day and it would just keep creating copies of it over and over and over again so you can see how that makes this really easy and remember since these are components we can still come in here and draw our railings in here pretty easily so that's another option if you don't feel like messing around with the circles over here memory copy is a great option for that so the next method isn't necessarily as much a way that we're gonna create spiral stairs as it is a way that we're gonna create a solid railing and so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to use this staircase that we created before as our example and so what we're gonna do in this case is we're actually going to come in here and we're gonna use the extension curve all off to create a solid railing around the outside of this okay so what we're gonna do on this one is we're actually going to start off and we're gonna make a copy off to the side and it's very important when you do this that you select all of this and you make this unique so what you don't want to do is you don't want to make a whole bunch of changes in here because you can see how these are still linked because they're all copies of the same components so you can see how when I made that change it changed over here and over here because I made copies of components so what you want to do is you want to select all of this in your copy right click on this and click and make unique and so once you've made this unique what you're gonna do is you're gonna come in here and you're gonna redraw your stair lines so in this case what we want is we want these lines to run up and down on the outside and inside so instead of them sitting on the top here we want them to be on the outside and so I'm just gonna come in here and I'm gonna draw a pair of 3-foot lines and then once I've done that I'm actually gonna come in here and I'm gonna erase out the stair geometry itself so that all I have in here is these lines so all I'm gonna have left is these vertical lines and so once we've done that all we want to do is we just want to draw a line along each one of these points and you can see how since these are components when we draw this in one of these it's drawing them in all of these and basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to just get these vertical or these uh these lines that are kind of running down along our spiral and then once we've gotten those lines we're actually going to come in here and we're gonna delete out our vertical lines so you can see how what that does is that basically leaves me with a whole bunch of components just kind of running in this spiral shape and this is why we wanted to make it copy because you can see this is a destructive way that we're doing this and that we're deleting out all the component functionality but what we're gonna do is we're just gonna select this we're gonna right-click and we're gonna explode it so that these are actually in here as raw lines and then we're just going to draw a vertical line at the end of each one of these so basically what we're doing is we're closing this in so this has like a full frame in it for each one of these so you can see how I have the two separate spirals in here well in this case what I can do is I can triple click and I'm gonna use the extension curve aloft which I'll link to in the notes below and we're gonna use the option for skinning of shapes and you can see how when I use the option for skinning of shapes what this does is this fills this in with a face so we're gonna do that for both of these so you can see how now we have these solid shapes in here I'm gonna go ahead and reverse the faces and so what we're gonna do in this case is we're gonna select these two objects and we're just gonna move them into place over here so if you remember this started off with a base point right here so if you find your bottom point and move it to the midpoint of your bottom stare then the subtle line up pretty good and you can see how with this stare in particular and I'm actually going to go in here and I'm gonna make this set of components unique so they don't change my original stare over here but you can see how right now and you can come in here and you can erase out your extra lines as well because you don't need those anymore you just need your steps you can see how this doesn't exactly work because it's kind of inside your stare at the moment and part of that's just because we drew these lines from this point to this point so you can see how it's kind of behind here but that's okay because we're gonna use the extension joint push-pull to give this thickness so in this case and I'll link to that in the notes below as well we're gonna use this to just thicken this wall edge so you can see I can click and drag in order to do that and you can see how I can just give that thickness and so you may want to come in here and use a more precise value like let's say we want this wall to be six inches or something like that and you may have to play around if this to get the exact results that you want so you can see how this needs to get moved down a little bit well all I need to do is just use the move tool and I can just move this straight down so you can see how I selected this face then I clicked on this point and I click down and you may have to adjust some of this for your workflow so obviously we're getting into some kind of custom creation type stuff but you can see how this allows you to create this thickened wall so when the other thing you may want to know when you're doing this is when you use joint push-pull you probably want to use the thickened finishing so what the thickened will do is instead of deleting your original face it'll leave it in there so when I push pull this in if you have the other option in here for erase original face then it'll race your interior face which you do not want to do so then I'm just gonna do the same thing where I use the Move tool to move this down and so you can see how I have this interior exterior wall so that's how you can create a spiral staircase with walls in here and again you may have to make some adjustments and then the final method I want to talk about is I want to talk about using the extension a thousand and one bit tools so we talked about a thousand in one bit tools a little bit last week there's probably some other extensions that do this as well but this actually has a spiral staircase creation tool and before I use this I'm going to save a copy of my model so basically all you have to do is you can just click on this option for build standard spiral staircase and what that'll do is that'll allow you to set everything from your step width to the angle you can set the number of risers that you have in here how tall the whole thing is going to be you can create your different handrails and also set if you want intermediate rails or not and it has two types built in here as well so you can either build the type that has a gap in between them or you can also build the type that just kind of steps up then you just come in here and you just click build staircase and you just click and it's gonna take a second to create all this different geometry but you can see how that creates your spiral stair really quickly and really easily so depending on the kind of stair you want to create it may be easier to just use an extension and there's a couple other ways that you could kind of do this you could use flow fi or like a shape bender or fredo scales radial bend tool to create a straight stair and then bend it in a circle and kind of run out of time in this video and the problem with those is I have trouble getting those to go in a full circle so there are a couple other extension methods that you can use that I'm not going to get into in this video so that's where I'm gonna in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought did you know about some of these methods how do you create spiral stairs in Sketchup I just love having that Sketchup conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing on this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 235,457

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup spiral staircase tutorial, sketchup spiral staircase, sketchup spiral staircase plugin, how to make spiral stairs in sketchup, sketchup spiral stair

Id: 5WLqNj6ihT4

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018