In this video segment,
we're going to take a look at how stairs work in the Home Designer product.
As you can see in the example on the screen here,
there's a variety of different stairs that you can create.
Let's go into the program and take a look at the different types of stairs the
product offers. Under the stair tools in Home Designer,
you'll find six different types of stair tools along with a ramp and a landing
tool. Let's begin by taking a look at the draw stair tool.
The draw stair tool is a manual approach to clicking and dragging a specific set
of stairs. When you do this, the stairs by default will go in the up direction.
You can also hold the Alt key down and click and drag and force your stairs to
go in a down direction.
The next stair tool is straight stairs.
You click and place these stairs and typically these will reach to the next
platform above when you have a two-story house or you may have a basement and a
story above and they're intelligent and will reach to the next platform
automatically.
The next sets of stairs that you will find are curved to the right and curved to
the left. They work in the same approach. You just click and place them. Again,
they're intelligence stairs. They will then reach the next platform above.
You can edit these stairs by clicking on them and you'll find a couple of
different handles, one that allows you to change the curvature of the stair.
You'll also find a move handle to move these stairs and then also one that will
change the width by using this different edit handle on the stairs.
When the stair is selected,
there's a couple of tools that you'll find that allow you to flare the stairs
and create a starter tread. You'll find this tool down in your lower edit menu.
The first tool is the flare curve stair tool. When you enable this tool,
you can come up to the stairs and create a flare on the stair.
You'll also find an edit handle to increase the size of the flare.
You have added flexibility for creating that flare.
The next tool is to create a starter tread.
This enables you to create two different starter treads by clicking on the
circle in this case and expanding it out to create a starter tread.
The next stair tool that you'll find in the stair menu is the L shaped stair.
When you click to use this stair,
it's going to ask if you want to create it in a clockwise or counterclockwise
direction, then you can click and place your stairs.
The next stair tool very similar to the L stair tool is the U shaped stair tool,
and again the program will ask you if you want to do a clockwise or
counterclockwise and if you want to have a gap in between the two different
stair segments. When you click in place your use stairs,
they will then follow the parameters that you entered into that dialogue.
The next stair tool you'll find available is the ramp tool that is covered in a
separate video and then you'll find a landing tool that you can click and place
a landing by clicking and dragging. These will also connect.
If you click and drag next to a landing,
they will connect and if you're using a set of stairs,
if I were to click and use the click-drag stair in a close fashion like this and
then use the landing tool to click in between them,
it will automatically connect those stair segments if they are close enough
using the landing tool.
Let's go in and take a 3D view and see what these stairs look like using the
dollhouse camera view. In this 3D view,
you see the different stair styles that we've created.
Let's begin by taking a look at the simple little landings that were created.
Let's say you want to use landings for a specialty project.
You may want to remove the railing off of one of the sides.
When you click on a landing, click on an edge, in this case,
notice in the video there is a red edge that is active.
In your lower edit menu,
there is a tool that says remove railing from the selected edge and that will
remove that railing off of that edge. Next,
let's take a look at the stair dialog.
I'm going to grab the stairs in the very back here.
Double click to open them up.
This will open up the stair specification dialogue and you're going to find a
number of panels down the side. Beginning with the general panel,
these were the click-drag stairs that we used and notice that there's a button
down here that says make best fit.
This indicates that the stairs currently do not reach between two platforms.
Even though we don't have a floor one and a floor two,
the default floors heights require a much longer stair and when your stairs are
too short,
it will indicate by having this button down here to click make best fit.
When you enable that,
it will then extend the stairs between the two platforms,
so keep an eye if you've used a set of stairs and this button is active,
you can then enable it to make your stairs fit.
Below are some advanced options that will enable you to have automatic treads,
to lock the tread depth,
or to specify the actual number of treads. When you enable these features,
it will un-gray those fields out.
You can come in here and type that information out.
In the case where you have two stair segments in this L stair shape,
you're going to always want to make sure your riser height matches so you don't
have mismatched riser heights. On the style component,
you'll find stringer information where you can control your stringer detail if
you want it to be open underneath and have open risers, runner,
and then the tread overhang, and the tread thickness.
On the railing panel you can specify how high your railing is, the landing,
railing height, the handrail width,
whether the railing is on and if it's on the left or the right, free-floating,
or at a wall, and then the style for the balusters,
whether it's open with a middle rail, different panels,
and then the top and rail,
you'll have controls down here for added control over the dimensions.
If you wanted to raise that, you would come in here and type in a value in here.
On the newels and balusters panel,
you can control if it has newels at the base of the stair and you can browse out
to the library,
choose which style you like and set the width and whether the rail passes over
the newel, what style of baluster, again, go out to the library.
I'm going to browse out to the library.
I'm going to show you a little bit shorter way to change the balusters and then
the line style, which is how it's displayed in your floor plan view,
the fill style, again,
this relates to your floor plan view and then the materials that are used for
the different components in the stair.
I prefer actually to do this in a 3D view and use the material painter and just
spray it directly from the library.
I'll open up the library in the program and let's take a look at how you can
change the different components on your stairs.
Underneath the architectural folder,
you're going to find a fences and railing folder.
In here you'll find different styles of railings.
You can easily grab these and apply these in a 3D view. In this case,
I'm just going to come over and you'll notice my cursor change.
When the cursor changes, I can then apply that onto the railing,
difficult to see exactly the way that looks.
Let's change our render style slightly to be a vector style so you can see where
that railing style has made the change. You can also browse into the library.
Come down here and underneath the millwork components,
you go find the balusters and newels.
Once you find the different styles that you're after, again,
you can come over here and click to apply those and see the preview of where
your baluster changed.
This is a little bit faster way than going through the stair dialogue itself and
if you want to change the colors of the stairs,
you can do that through the stair dialogue; you can find it in the library,
if you type a search for a color, you can also use the material eyedropper.
Pick up the color in this case, off the handrail,
apply it onto the stair tread and make that change for your stairs.
Again,
a little bit faster way than doing that through the material panel inside of the
stair dialog. In the next portion of the video,
I'm going to show you how to place a set of stairs in an actual plan and talk
about a few additional tools that we have here.
I've created a new plan here with both a first floor and a second floor.
I'm going to use a set of L stairs to create stairs from the first floor up to
the second floor. Using the stair tool,
I'm going to come down here and use the L stair,
except the defaults for the L stair.
I'm going to come over here and click and place these stairs.
Now before I actually click,
notice that you can move the cursor between the two different walls and it will
change the direction for you. Once you like the direction, in this case,
I'm going to go ahead and left-click actually place those stairs and it will
then formulate the up direction the way I want it to.
Once those stairs are created and you take a look at this in a 3D view,
we'll just use our camera here and point and click in the direction and now you
can see the L set of stairs in the first floor.
To create a stair opening for these stairs,
click on the stairs and in the lower edit menu,
there is an option here to create an automatic stairwell.
That will generate an opening in the floor above.
If I rotate my camera around a little bit more,
you can see the opening is now following the set of stairs and if I go back to
the floor plan view,
let's make some adjustments to that opening by going to the second floor.
And what's created here is what's called an open to below room in our program,
which just basically opens the platform up between the two floors.
This is a railing style.
You can click on this wall that's created the railing and you can actually
adjust it to whatever you'd like. In this case,
if I just make it a rectangular style room,
you can easily see how that's opened up the room.
And now when we take a 3D view, I'll go ahead and use the dollhouse camera view.
You can see the open to below room that was created from the automatic stairwell
that we adjusted and then you can go into the stairs itself and remove the
railing off the wall.
Double Click on the stair and then on the railing panel come over here and
remove the railing at the wall on the left in this case and it will simply
remove the railing.
One final thing for the stairs is placing walls next to or underneath of your
stairs. In this case, below the stairs.
Let's take a look at how you would put a wall underneath and then also have it
get cut off by the stairs.
Let's go back to our floor plan view and I'm going to use the interior wall tool
and come over here and just drag a wall next to the stairs,
to begin with and I'm going to go ahead and tile my window so that you can see
both the 2D and the 3D by using the tile vertically and it might be a little bit
easier if we go ahead and go down to the main floor.
So you can see how the wall is extending up past the stairs.
You can click on this wall in this view and as you use your arrow key to slide
the wall near the stairs,
you'll notice once the wall moves underneath the stairs that gets cut off and
you may have to adjust this so you pull it up and then the wall will get cut off
by the stairs. When the wall is on the outside of the stairs,
you can snap the stairs to the wall and have the stair form a stairwell and then
when the wall is underneath of the stairs,
you can then have the stairs cut it off once it's underneath of it and then one
small trick about this, when you de-select the wall, in this case,
it's very difficult to grab it because it's underneath of the stairs.
You can always turn off that layer in your display options or you can click near
the wall,
press your tab key and get to the next closest object and now you have control
over editing in that wall.
To learn more about the stair tools in Home Designer,
please refer to our help file.
We also have support articles available on our website.
Thanks for watching the video.