Adding stairs

- [Voiceover] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Architecture course, where we're looking at vertical circulation. So we've got a new drawing for you, it's called verticalcirculation.dwg. You may recognize it from some of the previous work you've done in some of the previous chapters, and the reason we're using this one is it's a typical sort of building that you might add a staircase to. Now staircases are the prime reason for vertical circulation in an AutoCAD Architecture model. You use them to get from one floor to another which is what vertical circulation's all about.

You're going up to get to the next floor. And if there was a lift, for example, or an escalator, that would also be classed as vertical circulation. So what we're going to do is in this drawing, our vertical circulation drawing, we're going to add a staircase. Now, there are two ways of doing it. You can go up to the home tab on the ribbon, and go to the build panel. Click on the little flyout here, and you've got stair, railing, or stair tower. So if I selected stair there, that would bring up the staircases in the properties palette like so.

I'm going to close the properties palette and hit escape there, and the other quick way of doing it is from your tool palette, your design palette. If you click on this little conglomeration of tabs here, and select stairs, there's all your stairs on a palette. Now I like the palette route. It's quite a nice, quick, and easy way of getting to things. It's up to you if you want to use the design tool palette or not. You can use the ribbon as well. Now, what I do want is I want a wood housed staircase. That one at the top of the list there.

Now what I am going to do though is do it from the build panel here. So if I click here and go stair, how do I get a wood housed staircase from the properties palette? Well, like before, in other chapters, we click on browse, and as you can see, it loads up all the staircases available to you in the styles browser. So there's our wood housed staircase there. If I double-click on that there, there's my wood housed staircase now in the properties palette. So I can close the styles browser. And I can place my wood housed staircase that way if I use the ribbon.

Now let me show you something. If I just hit escape a couple of times, all I've got to do here up on the palette is click here, go to stairs, go to wood housed, that's how quick and easy it is. It all appears in the one here. So there's my wood housed staircase. Now, what we've got to look at is the width and the height. They're in the properties palette, and they are dimensions A and B, you can see in there. If I slide down a bit, you can see that you get all of the different calculations available, like so.

A, B, and you've got C, D, E, F. And there's all the calculations at the bottom there. Now I need to place my staircase. I'm just going to place it about there in the top view of my architecture model, there like so. Now as you can see I can rotate it, I can take it at any angle I want. Drag it to the right horizontally using your polar tracking at zero degrees, and just click again to place the staircase. As you can see, it's placed there, it's now asking you, "Do you want to place another one?" I don't, so I'll just hit escape a couple of times to cancel the command.

Notice the properties palette disappears as usual. Going to zoom in real close on my staircase now. And what I need to do is place the staircase accurately. So what I'm going to do here is select the staircase like so, and then go to right-click and use my basic modify tools and select move. I'm going to pick that corner of the stair, bottom left, and if I zoom in real close, I'm going to go right on the corner of the wall there, and click there like so. Now that little green edge there is actually a plasterline.

But don't worry about it too much. Basically I'm just placing that so you can see how accurate you can place a staircase. Now if I zoom out slightly, and come back so I can see everything in plan in the top view, like that, there's my staircase, there's my building. What we're going to do now is go to the southwest isometric view, so I'll click here on the corner of the view cube. And as you can see, there's my staircase. Now it may be that I want a different isometric view there just to see it better. Click on a different corner, and there's my staircase coming off the corner of the wall.

If I zoom in nice and tight, you can see where that's housed with the wooden skirt, and it's all set up and ready to go. Now at the moment, I'm using the hidden visuals style in this particular drawing. Let's change that to something like shaded. And you can see then now you can see all the glass in the blue there on the right. You can see the gray of the blockwork, and you can see the brownish color there of the wood. Now if you want to do a quick orbit here, you can. There's a really quick keyboard shortcut. Hold down shift on the keyboard and hold down the wheel of your mouse and you get a little orbit symbol.

And just drag the mouse a little and you get a nice little orbit there and you can see your stairs like that rotating around and then maybe release those two buttons. Hold down the wheel and pan, and there's my staircase looking nice and lovely there like that. Now that's a wooden staircase. It's up to you if you want to stay in the shaded visual style. I'm going to go and click there and go back to my 2D wire frame. And you can see now how the staircase looks very different. Also as well, just to be on the safe side, let's jump back to an isometric view on the view cube, like so.

And just pan so that everything's sitting nicely on the screen. So we've now placed our staircase. And as you can see, it's going from ground floor level up to the next floor, which obviously isn't there yet. But you get the idea. And that's your vertical circulation that you're placing into your AutoCAD Architecture model.