Modeling stairs for architectural visualization with scripts in Blender 3D

There are a few parts of an architectural visualization project that demands a lot of working with the modeling. To model geometrical and clean surfaces like walls, we don't have to dedicate much time, basically because it's only a set of extruded faces and other primitive shapes. Well, it's like that for almost all projects. But, there are some parts of a project like stairs that can consume quite some time to be modeled, especially because for some projects we have unique designs for the stairs and the artists have to start the model from scratch.

Fortunately, there are a few scripts that can really help to create a basic shape for stairs in Blender 3d with only a few mouse clicks and the set of a few parameters. A few days ago a user from the blenderartists forums has posted a link to a script that gather in a single tool, four different scripts to create stairs. You can download the script and find some great examples of the stairs created by them at the forum thread.

From all five scripts available in the tool, there are two of them that are quite useful for creating spiral stairs, which can become really difficult to create. The resulting models are far from perfection and lack a lot of details, but they can be used as a starting point to start modeling your own stairs models.

If you are looking for something more sophisticated and complex, with even a better GUI to choose details of the stairs, go check out the StairCreator from an artist called guicas. I just found out about this today, while I was searching to write this article, and from a comment leaved in my other blog about computer graphics.

With the script we can choose several options to create stairs, and there is even an option to automatically calculate a few dimensions of the stair, based on the number and height of the steps.

All scripts are a great help to start modeling project, but all of them lack the creation of more details like railing and other ornaments.

But, even without railings the tools are quite handy! With the snap tools of Blender, we can start to add more details to the models very quickly!