Bullnose Stair treads

[Catmansound]

Is it possible to put a bullnose on the stair treads? If I'm working in 3D and I have a zoomed in view facing a stairway, the edges are all square. In reality most wood stairs are bullnose, looks a big goofy, especially when I render in 5D or Enscape. thanks.

[Catmansound]

Thanks everyone for a really great discussion and good suggestions, the tech folks who code this stuff and make it all possible do a fantastic job, glad we can all provide constrictive comments as my search for bullnose stair treads continues. 😁

[Tom W.]

On 11/13/2024 at 2:48 PM, Catmansound said:

Is it possible to put a bullnose on the stair treads? If I'm working in 3D and I have a zoomed in view facing a stairway, the edges are all square. In reality most wood stairs are bullnose, looks a big goofy, especially when I render in 5D or Enscape. thanks.

 

It would be great to see the goofy rendered final result to put all this in perspective.

[FiSlik]

On 11/15/2024 at 3:53 PM, Jeff Prince said:

I was being sarcastic, hence the prolific use of 🙂s

 

There are other programs you can use to make really nice stairs that do the BIM and rendering easily, it’s just not VWX at the moment.

 

Good answers @Catmansound and Jeff 🙂

 

I think my background biases my thoughts on this - I've historically used SketchUp for all my 3D work and VW for all my 2D. SU isn't technical enough for detail drawings (I'm a landscape designer) and the 3D on VW has historically been either really clunky or not good enough. Now it's finally starting to partner up with things like TwinMotion and Enscape I'm just willing everything to work seamlessly and I guess to take away the reason for using SU for visualisations.

 

Totally get what you say Jeff about building separately, but it's just that that's the kind of thing I want to avoid in my dream world! 😄

 

[Pat Stanford]

I just thought of another potential work around to generate the bullnose.

 

Set a working plane to the edge of the stair tread. Draw a rectangle that matches the tread. Draw a circle or arc or poly that represents the bullnose profile necessary. Add Surface to convert the rectangle and nose to a single profile. Extrude to the width of the stair or use the Push/Pull tool to do the extrusion.

With the extrusion selected, Scale Object Symmetrical by a factor of 1.001. This is enough to prevent Z fighting with the stair object, but unlikely enough to be noticed in the rendering.

 

You can either repeat on the treads you need for the render or use Duplicate Array or Move By Points in Duplicate mode to replicate on the other treads.

 

Texture as necessary.

 

I also did it making the "tread" and "nose" as extrudes first and then did Add Solids, but making a profile and then extruding seems easier.

 

Took me about 10 minutes to text both ways and write this post, so should go pretty fast after you do the first one.

 

HTH

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

I must be missing something, but it seems so clear.  This could be any version of Bull Nose, just used simple rounding.

 

 

[Pat Stanford]

But won't that leave a joint between the nose and the tread?  My way avoids that joint.

[line-weight]

2 hours ago, FiSlik said:

 

Good answers @Catmansound and Jeff 🙂

 

I think my background biases my thoughts on this - I've historically used SketchUp for all my 3D work and VW for all my 2D. SU isn't technical enough for detail drawings (I'm a landscape designer) and the 3D on VW has historically been either really clunky or not good enough. Now it's finally starting to partner up with things like TwinMotion and Enscape I'm just willing everything to work seamlessly and I guess to take away the reason for using SU for visualisations.

 

Totally get what you say Jeff about building separately, but it's just that that's the kind of thing I want to avoid in my dream world! 😄

 

I used to do 3d in SU and 2d in vectorworks.

 

A few years ago I switched to doing everything in VW with as little duplication as possible. My 2d documentation and 3d presentation drawings come essentially from the same model.

 

This is better in my opinion.

 

Where inefficiency creeps back in is with stuff like this, where the VW parametric tool doesn't create a good enough 3d object for many presentational purposes (or in fact good enough for 2d construction detail drawings).

 

Usually I start out with "near enough" version of the stair using the VW tool, and keep this for as long as I can get away with (and sometimes this can encompass some early stage design changes where the basic stair geometry can be easily reconfigured). But at some point I convert it (or build from scratch) into an actual representation of what is to be built. From that stage onwards I just cross my fingers that there won't be any major changes that mean I have to rebuild the whole thing. Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't.

 

Similar applies to the other VW objects which are really no good for anything more detailed than 1:100 or maybe 1:50 scale drawings: windows, doors, etc etc.

[Jeff Prince]

18 hours ago, FiSlik said:

I guess to take away the reason for using SU for visualisations.

I haven’t had a reason to use Sketchup in years after switching to VWX.  Even with some of VWX’s parametric tools leaving a bit to be desired, it’s way faster doing everything in one program than modeling x2 in separate ones.

 

I’m also in the landscape industry.  I haven’t run into anything I can’t model in vectorworks… except plants with complex branching and leaves.