7 Ways to CREATE STAIRS IN SKETCHUP!

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch essentials calm back with another Sketchup quick tutorial for you so in this video I wanted to talk about several different ways of creating different kinds of stairs in Sketchup there's a lot of different methods and different kinds of stairs you can create and I wanted to create a video that went through a few of them so before I get started today's video is brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course sketchup essentials course is a complete start-to-finish course that I put together to help people start using Sketchup fast so I cover everything from the basic tools in Sketchup all the way through modeling for interior design and modeling for layout and I go through an introduction to photorealistic rendering as well so if that's something you're interested in you're looking for a little bit more in-depth Sketchup training make sure you check that out at the Sketchup essentials comm slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it so in this video we're gonna talk about creating more straight staircases so in the future I'm going to create another video about ways to create spiral staircases but I'm gonna focus on the straight staircases to keep this from getting super long so method one is just for creating a simple rectangular stair and this goes all the way back to when Aiden Chopra was with Sketchup this is a method that he used to teach this is called the sub divided rectangle method so what you do is you draw a rectangle that's about the footprint of what your stair wants to be so in this case I'm going to draw a rectangle that's 4 foot by 15 foot and hit the enter key and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna divide this so we're gonna click on this line we're gonna right click you're gonna divide this into however many segments you want your stairs to have so and you can see this gives you a length so in this case let's say that your segments had we'll call it 12-inch steps so I'm just gonna right click on this line I'm going to divide and I'm gonna move my mouse until this gives me 15 segments at 1 foot each and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the Move tool in copy mode to copy this line so tap the M key or click on this line tap the M key and then tap the ctrl key to activate copy mode then I'll move my mouse right here and then I'll type in I was 14 and hit the inner key that'll create 14 copies of this and then the last thing I'm gonna do is let's say that this needs to go up 9 feet I'm gonna draw a 9 foot line right here and we'll just right click on this and we'll just divide this line into 15 segments so then we can just use the segments that are created in this line when we divide this you can just use your mouse to inference to those to create the rest of your steps and make sure you're paying attention and that you're not missing any of these because you could throw off the way that your steps work so then you can just come in and erase out these extra lines and this will leave you with stairs so I'm not the biggest fan of this one just because it takes a lot of manual creation but it definitely works so now let's talk about the second method so in the second method what we would do is we would copy profiles of the steps so instead of going through and push pulling them manually like this what we would do instead is we would create a vertical rectangle that basically represents what our stairs would look like so in this case I would create something that basically represents how tall the set of stairs would be and then what I could do and let's just say these we're going to be the same height so I'll just copy these over is you would basically draw lines for the profiles of your stairs and then what you can do is you can use the Move tool and copy mode to copy these up and across so again just select these two lines tap the M key tap the control key to activate copy mode click on this point to set your base click on this point to set your final and then you type in x 14 again and you can see what that did is that copied this up and across 14 different times so now you can just push pull this out by whatever you want your width to beam and you can see how you have an easy set of stairs so and you might have to come in here and draw over this to kind of heal this face but you can see how that easily allowed you to create your set of stairs and if you wanted to you could definitely come in here and draw a line across this back side and then push-pull this so that it goes away so you could definitely do that to create a set of stairs that doesn't that isn't solid all the way along the back like this is right here so method three instead of drawing all of your stairs at once you can use components and so in order to use components what you would do is you would first draw one tread so in this case I'm gonna say this is four foot by one foot so that will give me my tread width and then I'm gonna push pull it up so it has the same thickness as these stairs right here what we would do in this case is we would take this we would right click on it we would click make component and we would just call this something like stair tread component and so then we would just use the move tool and copy mode to copy this right here we type in x 14 and hit the enter key and this would give you your same 14 sets of stairs and so the nice thing about doing this this way is these are all components meaning you can take this and you can adjust their thickness and as you adjust one they'll all change because they're all components so that's one thing you can do with this and then the other thing you can do with this is you can also draw handrails so like for example if I was to just draw a line up it's kind of an example like a three foot line up you can see how I can add basically this railing piece in here on one side and because because these are components they show up in all the other components as well and then you could come in here and you could use an extension like pipe along path if you wanted to or something else in order to create kind of a pipe handrail you could really do whatever you want with this to create a very basic handrail so building on top of this components method you could also create an l-shaped stair using similar principles so we could draw a 4 foot by 1 foot step we'll give this the same thickness as this one over here and you could make this a component and in this case we'll call this stair L shape step and what you could do in this case is you could use the Move tool and copy mode to create let's say six of your copies and then you could take this last one because it's a component you don't want to adjust this last one because all your other ones are gonna change as well what you could do is you could right-click on this and you could click make unique or you could just draw this in manually but what you can do is you could take this one and you could push pull it so that it's wider so let's say we wanted a four foot step we could push pull that one like that and then you can take this component and you can use the Move tool and copy mode to copy it and then you could just rotate it and you can just kind of put this in place and in this case I would move this up a little bit then I would do the same thing for the rest of my components so in this case I would type in x I think probably five maybe times six and hit the enter key so you can see how you can use this same thing to come in here and create these steps now the only downside to this is if you were to try to do the handrail thing that we did in the last video you'd run into some problems you'd have to manually draw in the handrail right here going around this corner so it's not really the end of the world but it is something to be aware of the other thing you'd probably have to do is you'd have to looks like because the way these are rotated I'd probably have to flip them so I would just use the scale tool or you could select them all right click and do a flip along one of the axes and this is one thing you might want to make sure you get straight if you're gonna do a handrail before you create your second set of copies is just make sure that you come in here and you create these properly so you could just kind of manually draw this corner rail in here and then you could extrude your handrail along your path so that's how you could create an l-shaped stair you could do something very similar with a u-shape stair so in this case you could come in here we'll do the same thing four foot by one foot rectangle we'll push pull it up we'll make it a component in this case we'll call it stair step u-shape we'll do times five to create our copy right here maybe we'll do times six just to keep these the same and then what we would do in this case is we would right-click and make this unique then you do the same thing where you push pull this out and one trick that I would do in this case because we're gonna want another landing is I would use the push/pull tool and create new face mode so I would activate the push-pull tool then I would tap the control key when I tap the control key instead of moving this existing face you can see how this is going to create a new face and the reason I would do that is now I have this extra face over here that I could push pull out another 48 inches so you can see how I can use that to basically extrude a longer step over here and then all I would have to do is just make another copy of this step over here and then I can use the move tool in copy mode to create the rest of my steps so you can see how creating this landing and this turnaround is really easy and again remember all of these are components so you can make some adjustments to the way that the thickness these steps are as well so again you'd kind of have to go in and manually do a little bit with the handrail but you could create a u-shaped step really easily all right so another way you can do this is you can use the extension flow if I to bend stairs around a rectangular shape so in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start off and I'm just gonna draw a flat plane so that I make sure that I draw these on the right starting on the right height but what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm going to draw a 30 foot by 12 foot rectangle so 30 foot comma 12 foot and so then I'm also going to come over here and I'm gonna draw a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot edge and knowing these lengths is going to be important now you can erase out this extra stuff what you're gonna do now is you're gonna figure out what how long you want your steps to be so in this case I've got a 30 foot I've got a 30 foot length in here so if I was to divide this into 30 segments those should all be 1 foot long so in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make this a group and then I'm going to take these lines right here and I'm gonna divide them into 10 segments each so I'm just clicking on these right clicking and clicking divided and so now you can see these are all in here as as basically 1 foot long segments and so there's an extension that could probably do this but in this case I'm just gonna draw these up and I'm just gonna make copies of them real quick using the move tool in copy mode so I created 10 copies there 10 copies there 10 copies there and then I'm just gonna draw a line across the top to create my faces and so you can see what I'm doing here is basically I'm creating the face along which my steps are gonna go whoops but I'm also subdividing everything so that flow fi will work properly so I'll show you what I'm doing in just a second so for those of you that remember flow fi is an extension that allows you to bend geometry so in this case what you can do and by the way I'm gonna link to another channel I'm gonna link to the tutorials up channel um they have a lot more detail on this method so they're the first ones I've seen really do this method with this rectangular edge I've done a video in the past about creating spiral staircases with flow fi but in this case this one is the first one I've seen this is a really good idea for bending things around a rectangular edge but if you remember with flow fi what you do is you basically take a rectangular shape and it'll bend geometry that's on this face around this shape and so what I've done is I've created a group with my flat canvas I've created a group with my target shape and I've created a group with my two edges leading to those points and so then I've put all three of those in a group and then once you do that you can use the extension flow of 5 so you can go up to extensions flow if I impose grid and what that's gonna do is that's gonna show you how it's gonna subdivide this face so in this case I should have 30 edges in here and I've got a height of twelve feet so I'm gonna do 12 feet or in this case 12 times 12 that's 144 inches and then we'll divide that by 30 so each one of my steps needs to go up 4.8 inches so I'm gonna draw a 4.8 inch step up then I'm gonna draw this across and we're just gonna copy it up kind of like we did in the copy profile method earlier and so I should be able to type in x 29 yep there we go and copy this all the way across and so then all I'm going to do is I'm going to extrude out my stairs so we'll extrude these out four feet and probably what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm gonna draw from this point you can see how I'm inferencing over to this point and we'll push pull away the extra so we have more this like stairwell shape and then we'll just triple click on this and we'll right click and we'll make it a group so what that gives us is that gives us our flow if I group and that gives us our stair group and you're just gonna do a shift click to select both of them you're gonna go to extensions flow if I flow if I and what that's gonna do is that's gonna bend this around this corner and you can see how because we set each one of these up everything looks really good except for these edges right here and so for these edges right here what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to come in here and I'm just gonna split this I'm actually gonna erase out the stuff around this corner and I'm just gonna manually draw this in and so in this case to manually draw this in I'm just going to draw a rectangular shape and you can see how I'm using inferencing in order to do this and then I'm just gonna push pull this down to give it thickness so the other thing you probably need to do is you'll need to come in here and you'll need to kind of fill in this geometry you can see how that gets a little bit weird if you really get hung up on it you can come in here and you can make it line up exactly the way that you want it to line up so in this case I'd probably draw a straight line across here and then an edge across here and I'd erase out this extra so that gives us this kind of continuous stare shape and so all you would do is you would do the same thing over here so you could click out all that and then you could just come in here and you can just hide your flow if I groove and you could come in here and you could draw some extra geometry in here make this continue you could kind of make it a little cleaner but you can see how you can use that to bend steps along a face and so then the last thing I'm going to talk about in this video is you can also use extensions to create stairs so there's a lot of different extensions out there for stairs so so the free one that I'm aware of as a thousand and one bit tools and I'll link to my video about a thousand and one bit tools down below but that allows you to create multiple different kinds of staircases so you can create like a metal timber a dogleg single flight staircase it's also got spiral staircases in here so like for example if I wanted to create this metal timber I would just click on it I'm gonna gives me a whole bunch of different options in here or how tall I want it to be how thick the slabs are so it's very detailed and then you just come in here and you just set your angle and then you click and it'll create your stair for you so it's a little more geometry heavy a little more detailed but you can see how it's got these edges here ready to go so there's other extensions as well I think GK where has one I'm there the same guys that give you the cabinetmaker extension but that's a little bit more expensive so you do have to pay for that one I want to say Valley architects has one I may have to go to their website yeah so Valley architects also has one so their stuff is all subscription-based but it creates different kinds of stairs as well so you can definitely get an extension that does this I want to say s4 you may have that as well you know so I think s4 you has one as well I've never used this one but that's also a paid extension but if you don't want to come in here and create the geometry yourself there's a bunch of different options for for creating different kinds of steps using extensions so I think this video is getting a little bit long so I wanted to talk about us spiral staircases as well I think I'm just gonna break that off into its own video but leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you know about some of these methods how have you been creating stairs and your Sketchup models I just love having a 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 to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing in 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 not will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 322,082

Rating: 4.9556141 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, sketchup, sketchup stairs, sketchup stairs tutorial, sketchup staircase, sketchup stair railing, sketchup stairs design, sketchup stair plugin, sketchup stair plugin free, sketchup stair extension, sketchup steps, sketchup 1001bit tools, sketchup flowify, sketchup flowify stair

Id: MCmW394TyMA

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018