Hi Stephen,
Happily this is quite an easy style to recreate. I'd create the stairs and railings as separate RailClone objects, both using L1S arrays. Here's a step-by-step procedure for the stairs, the railings are fairly standard - in fact I used glass handrail 3 from the built in library. There's also a scene file attached that you should be able to examine to make things a little clearer.
- Model a single step - don't worry about any distortion, just model it flat and Railclone can bend it to follow a helical spline for you. Here's an example:
- Create a new helix. Convert it to an editable spline, go to the spline sub object mode, select the spline and convert from line to curve. Go to vertex mode and convert all vertices to bezier curves or smooth.
- Now create a new RailClone Object. Add an L1S generator, a spline and a segment object.
- Wire the spline to the Generator's spline input and pick the Helix from the scene
- In the segment node select the tread you modelled in step 1, wire this to the default input
- Go to the segment's properties and change the deform mode to stepped. because we want the underside to deform to follow the spline increase the Vertical Bottom value until the underside is deformed to follow the spline and the treads remain stepped.
- To avoid ending up with a half a tread at the top of the stairs I'd change the generators>rules>mode to adaptive
- If you want the deformation to be a little smoother, increase the curve steps from style rollout in the the modify panel.
The handrail is essentially the same as any railings style. If you haven't seen it the Masonry Wall (
http://www.itoosoft.com/railclone/tutorials/tutorial_wall.phptutorial )will go through the techniques used to create this type of model. In the example I simply slightly modified the Glass Handrail 3 style from the library. Below are the list of changes I made.
- To create two handrails either side of the spline, open the style editor and turn on mirror. Adjust the Y Offset value to control the distance the handrails are moved from the spline. If the style is asymettric you may want to turn on mirror too.
- because the inner handrail had some undesirable distortion, I turned on Simple Y Offset from the style rollout in the modify panel.
Hope that makes sense, please let me know if anything needs clarifying.
Many thanks,
Paul