Grading Stairs

[darrell_kennedy]

Hi all,

Does anyone know how to grade in stairs? I have a river bank and I'd like to grade in stairs from the top of bank to the waterline. I created an alignment down the centerline of the path to the stairs and the stairs themselves, I then created a profile view for the alignment, and then created a design profiles to mimic the stairs. I created an assembly that consists of a LinkSlopeWidth of 5' at 0 slope on both sides of the alignment for the duration of the stairs. I then created a corridor using the design profile as the vertical baseline and the alignment as the horizontal baseline. When created a surface from corridor it looks really wonky. I tried toying with the corridor frequency and increments but that didn't work. And then instead of making the design profile being horizontal and vertical steps, I changed it to horizontal and slope -99999.99% just to fool the system into thinking it was a slope and it wasn't vertical. Still no luck.

Any ideas? Is now the time to start learning revit or infraworks and incorporating it into my Civil3D... if so there's not time like the present... but where to begin!?

Thanks,

Darrell

[rl_jackson]

You can't do a 0 slope in C3D period. There must be some slope. 

[darrell_kennedy]

Very thoughtful and informative answer there rl_jackson, thanks for the input. 

[fcernst]

[Neilw_05]

This topic came up before recently. You might find some ideas there too. One approach is to not model the stairs using a TIN but instead use plain 3D objects if you need to show the steps in renderings. The alignment and profile would be used to establish the pitch and landings and adjacent grading but not for modeling the stairs. The stairs could be easily laid out using arrays or a dynamic block. I'm sure there are lots of articles about that.