Hello,
I'm very happy to present you the new staircase generator plug-in, one of the main missing plug-ins in Sweet Home 3D. The dialog box shown by its Tools > Generate staircase menu item allows you to create the staircase of your choice from the number of stairs you want and their size.
It allows to quickly design straight staircases, square spiral staircases, spiral staircases, quarter turn staircases and U shaped staircases. For quarter turn and U shaped staircases, you may specify the number of stairs before the first turn and the number of stairs in the turn.
If the model you want doesn't exist, you may also assemble basic staircases, the reason why intermediate straight, square spiral and spiral staircases are proposed. These models have longer handrails and connections at the end of their stringers to connect them to another staircase (actually, quarter turn staircases and U shaped staircases are themselves made of intermediate staircases).
For example, this allows you to build a staircase with a round part or a triple winder staircase.
The plug-in lets you choose whether you want some stringers and handrails at the left or right of the generated staircase, but you may also customize the look of the staircase afterwards by changing its materials as explained in this article. As texture coordinates are also generated with a little random offset for each tread and riser, you'll be able to get a nice wooden staircase where treads and risers don't repeat exactly the same texture.
If you want turns in the opposite direction, just choose the Plan > Flip horizontally menu item or the Mirrored shape option in the furniture modification pane.
Note also that the plug-in proposes a Generate cut out shape check box that you may unselect if the default generated cut out shape in the ceiling doesn't match the one you want. In that case, you'll have to draw a room at the upper level which will surround the staircase to get a correct hole.
Finally, for users who want super precise values, keep in mind that the additional decimals you may enter in number text fields are not ignored but just not displayed once a value is entered (typing "2.61" will display 2.6 even if 2.61 is actually stored). When you need to compute some values like stair height or elevations, you may also find practical to enter a formula like "262 / 15", if you need to compute the stair height of a 262 cm high staircase with 15 stairs.
I hope that you'll like this plug-in and that it will match most of your needs.
Many thanks to the SNPS (French forensics) for their financial contribution to this plug-in.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
