Bill Tillman Posted November 23, 2008 Share Posted November 23, 2008 I'm constructing a set of circular stairs in 3D. My problem arises when I'm trying to draw a 3D polyline for the handrail. I draw as much of it as I can in the current view. But then all the lines of the treads get busy and make it hard to see the endpoints I want. Is there a way to interupt the drawing of a polyline and rotate the view, then go back and pickup where you left off with the polyline? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuccaro Posted November 23, 2008 Share Posted November 23, 2008 In AutoCAD 2006 the 3DORBIT command does this job. Are the handrails helixes? If so you can use that command instead of drawing manually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shift1313 Posted November 23, 2008 Share Posted November 23, 2008 bill, you can rotate during spline and pline commands but unless you have points to snap to, i believe you will still be drawing in the same plane. I would use the helix command personally just as fuccaro mentioned above. One method i have used before since i dont have helix on older version of cad was to draw a single line from (0,0) out to my point of interest(5,0). create an array, say you needed a stair every 7", have your row or column offset set to 7, then after the array i go back and rotate each line a set degree. in this drawing i just made i rotated them 30degrees. This gave me a set of snap points to use with my SPLINE command. Since you are using 09, you can use this spline to sweep your handrail along this path. This is essentially the helix command though, just with more work:) since im using 05 i couldnt show you helix or sweep here. The only benefit i see to drawing lines and creating a path is that you will already have stair edge lines. I have never drawn a spiral stair case so im not really sure how i would go about it without trying though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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