Working with stairs

In this movie, we're going to look at stairs. Stairs come in two varieties. Here, we have a component based stair and we have the traditional sketch-based stair. In this movie, I'm going to focus on the traditional sketch-base stair. I'm in a file here called Sketch-Based Stairs, and I'm in the level two floor plan. And I'm going to work down in the lobby, in the lower portion of the plan. So, I'm going to zoom in, right here on this area of the plan right here, and it's labeled Stair A. Now, if we go to the architecture tab, we'll find the stair tool.

And if you click the little drop down, you can see the two types that I just mentioned, Stair by Component. And stair by sketch, so in this case we're going to choose our stair by sketch. And that will take me into our traditional sketch mode. There's a few things we want to do before we start clicking points in the stair sketch. The first thing is, there are a couple draw modes, like we've had in other sketch modes. We've got Run, Boundary, and Riser. Now, Run is by far the easiest mode. Because it will actually create all the pieces that are required in the sketch, with just a few clicks.

So, you typically want to try and use run wherever you can. If you look at the tooltip that's appeared on my screen there you can see that the sketch will come in three colors. You'll have a green color which represents the boundary lines the outline of the stair and you're going to have an outline on either side. You'll have a blue line which runs down the middle of the stair and that just represents the path of the stair. And then finally, you'll have some black lines, which represent the riser lines. So, I want to make sure run is chosen. Next, I want to look over here on my property's palate and verify that the settings here are correct and what I expect.

So, I'm going to start at level two, because I'm in the level two floor plan, and I want this stair to go up to level three. So those two settings are fine. That will determines for me how many risers rivets needs to create. So because I am going up to those two floors, it does that math, it base that math on the maximum riser hight and you can see that, right here the actual riser height is just shorter seven inches. Well, if we would click, edit, type, you can see here that the type for the stair seven inch max/g,11-inch tread.

If we would click edit, type, and scroll down, what you would see here is that under Risers the maximum riser height is seven inches. So, if I cancel out of here, it's just simply doing the math and trying to get me as close to seven inches as it can and it came up with a number of risers of 18. Now, you can actually modify that number if you needed to, but you can't modify to a point that makes the riser taller than seven inches. If you do Revit will generate an error message. Now, we have a width parameter right here as well.

I'm going to change that to four feet. You can change it later, but it's usually easier if you remember to do it first, because then the size of the stair is a little bit easier to control. So, I've got that, and then I don't try and get my stair in exactly the right spot first try. What I usually do is I click nearby and just kind of build it nearby and then I'll move it into place. I find that a little bit easier. Now I'm going to start moving my mouse down and I want you to look very carefully at the little message that appears directly below my cursor.

So, you can see that the message currently says, nine risers created, nine remaining. You want to pay attention that message because that's letting you know basically when you need to click. So, what I'm going to do right now is click my mouse. And that creates the first run of stairs. Now, you can create as many runs in your stairs as you need. So, each time you create a run, what will happen is when you create the next run, Revit will create a landing automatically for you to join the two runs together. So, when you're using this tool, you're just drawing the run.

You do not draw their landings. Revit takes care of the landings. Let me show you. I'm going to move my mouse over here, and keep it lined up with one. Click, pull it straight up until it says zero remaining, and then I'll click again. And you'll see here how it created the landing sketch for me. So, you just draw the runs, you do that with a few clicks, and Revit sort of fills in the details. Now once we have that, we can take this entire sketch, and I'm just going to put a window around the whole thing.

We can use our standard modification tools, like the Move tool. And I'm going to move from this end point, and I'm going to snap it right to that end point. And that gets it positioned at the correct starting point. Next what I'm going to do is select only this half of the stair because you see this nice little gap over here to the wall? I want to match that same amount over here. Now I could do another move command, but I'd have to know how far to move it. And since I eye-balled my clicks, I don't really know what that is.

But if you recall in a previous movie, we talked about this really handy tool right over here called activate dimensions. So, make sure that you have just the right hand side of the stair selected, you click on activate dimensions, that will give you a series of temporary dimensions and very useful locations, like this one right here. And I can simply type in 4 inches there. And that will move just that run of the stair over, so that it's 4 inches off of the inside wall. If you want to make any additional modifications, like selecting this sketch line, for example, and maybe dragging this witness line grip to here, and I could say instead of a 4 foot landing, I want to have a 5 foot landing.

It's really up to you. So, the last thing I want to do, before I finish this sketch is, over here on the ribbon, I want to click this Railing button. And what this does is, Revit creates railings automatically on the stair for me on both sides. Now If I want to, I can actually change what railing it's going to use. So, if I wanted a particular type of guard rail or handrail or something like that. So in this case, I'm going to just choose a guard rail pipe and I'm going to assign it to the stringers. Then I'm going to click okay. Then, finally I come over here and click Finish' Edit mode'.

And that will complete the stair. If you look over here we're seeing just a portion of the stair going up and really the best way to see the stair is to come down to the sections, open up section one, zoom in. And you can see, our stair going up between levels two and three. Now, if we look at level one, we obviously need a stair down there. So, I'm going to scroll over here to my level one floor plan.

And, I have a slightly larger lobby in this location. So, I might be able to get away with just a straight run stair, over here. That's a lot simpler to create than a switch back stair, because it's really just two clicks. Now, I'm going to do this one also with the Stair by Sketch. But, I just want to point out that you could easily do this with Stair by Component, as well. Let's do Stair by Sketch. I want to verify all of my settings again. You can see it remembered all of the same settings. I'll start right about here and I'll pull it all the way to the end. So the only thing that we do differently this time is we use up all of the risers in a single sketch, select everything, activate the dimensions, make that four inches.

Deselect, check my railing, still guard rail pipe, and I'll click finish. Lets reopen our section, and there's our result. You can see that I'm a little off right there, so I could just move that stair,. To make it match up but those are fine tuning results that you can fiddle with on your own. So ,sketch base stairs use the same sketch-based methodology that we've looked at in other movies like floors and roofs and so on.

You sketch the overall runs of the stairs and from that sketch Revvit creates the three dimensional stair.