From the course: AutoCAD Architecture 2021 Essential Training

Adding stairs - AutoCAD Architecture Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Architecture 2021 Essential Training

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Adding stairs

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Architecture essential training. We're going to start thinking about vertical circulation. Vertical circulation is a term that is used for the transition between one floor and the next floor of a model. For example, a staircase would take you up from say the ground floor to the first floor of the building you can see on the screen. Also things like lifts, sometimes known as elevators, take you up to various floors in a multistory building. And escalators are those slow moving staircases that take you up and down in say an underground railway system like in London in the underground in London. Vertical circulation is anything that is making a transition from one floor to the other. We've got a new drawing for you for this chapter. It's called surprise, surprise, verticalcirculation.DWG. You can download it from the library to follow along with the videos in the chapter. You'll recognize the drawing from previous chapters and videos as well. It's the building where we placed all the openings, and the doors, and the windows and so on in previous chapters. What we're going to do is insert a simple parametric staircase into our model. We're not actually going to develop any more floors. I'm just going to show you how to place a simple staircase at a known location in the model. There's two ways of doing this. There's one way, which involves a lot of clicks, and there's another way which involves less clicks. But before we do that, let's go into the view in our model that'll make things a lot easier. That's the top view. We need to be looking down on our model. You can do that in the dropdown menu over on the left here. You can select top there. Or I can go over to the view cube and select the top view on the view cube. Either way you end up looking down in a plan view like so. Then we're going to go to the build panel here in the home tab on the ribbon and select the staff layout and click on stair like so. Automatically the properties palette will kick in and I can now browse here like so for the staircase that I want to use. You've got various ones available in the content library. That's concrete, standard, wood housed, cantilever, there's a concrete one, a half wall rail, and so on. Now I want a wood house one. So in the styles browser that's popped up I would double click on it. That gives you the little plus sign allowing you to add the object to the model. Also it defaults into the properties palette here as well like so. Then I would happily close the style's browser and think about placing my staircase like so. I'm just going to hit escape a couple of times to cancel that command and the properties palette disappears. I've always mentioned that our tool palettes over here on the right are very useful and they come up by default when you first start using AutoCAD Architecture. You'll notice I'm in a stairs tab there and there's all different staircases available. If I right click on this little bunched up bunch of tabs here, that lists all the tabs that are available. If you haven't got the stairs tab, just right click there, select stairs in the list and it goes to the stairs tab. There's my wood house staircase there and I just click. It's that quick. I don't have to worry about the styles browser because it automatically puts my wood house staircase into the properties palette, allowing me to work with the properties. Now we think about things in our staircase. So I can use the slider bar here and I can see all the information. You can see, even see the calculations of how the stair is modeled you'll notice, with A to F there as the variables that can be changed. The only thing I'm going to change is the justification. It can go to left, center, or right. I'm going to select a right justification. Can you see the crosshair is on the right hand bottom corner there of the staircase? The staircase is going from left to right. If you think about it, if you're facing that staircase at the bottom of the staircase where the crosshair is, it is the right hand bottom corner of the staircase where the crosshair is. I'm going to zoom in and on the top end of the curve wall, there's an end point snap there. Make sure your object snaps are on. I left click to place the staircase. I then drag for direction. Utilize your palette tracking here to get an angle that you want. In my case is zero. So I'm dragging along the green dash palette tracking line to the right. I left click again and my staircase is placed. It's now prompting me as you can see for another staircase. I can just hit escape a couple of times. Now it canceled the command. I'm going to double click on the wheel now. There's my staircase in my model. It doesn't look that amazing in the top view. But let's go to the southwest isometric view. I click on the fly out here where it says top. Southwest isometric. My staircase is now modeled immaculately to that level that I had in the property. If I now select the staircase. Right click and go to properties on the shortcut menu. You'll notice there that it's going up to a height of three meters, 3,000 millimeters in there like so. I'll leave that as it is. That's fine. I'll just hit escape now to deselect the staircase. You can see now that we've placed the staircase in our model, ready to go.

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