The Rendering Times: Topas Try Me's -- Spiral Stair Case

Topas Try Me's: Spiral Stair Case

Creating any natural model challenges the designer on every platform. Making an everyday object look convincing and not a 'bad copy' is a task that many 3D illustrators, animators, and groupies aspire to everyday. Some objects, though they may not be seen everyday, still present us with a challenge when we are faced with creating them.

Such is the case of -- The Spiral Stairway.

We recommend that in all cases of modeling you work with PERSPECTIVE off. Otherwise, if you are only working visually, you may not end up with what you expected.

1. Set your VIEW -- DISPLAY OPTIONS --
GRID SIZE to .1 ft.

Turn GRID ON, and snap to points.

2. Create your stair step polygon: BUILD -- SIMPLE POLYGON.

Select the LINE tool and create a shape like that at the right. Stepping 1 down and 2 to the right.

Quite possibly the most difficult portion of this tutorial is the following step. It may help if you turn off the GRID at this point.

3. You now want to MODIFY -- POLYGON -- PAGE ROLL the wonderful step shape polygon you have just labored so intensely over.

Be sure to set the STARTING DIRECTION as -90 degrees, and the ending direction at 180 degrees. Typing the amounts is usually much quicker than trying to get it to line up exactly with a mouse or other pointing device.
Set your starting radius to .5 ft.
Set your ending radius to the smallest that you can. It should be just a hair over .5 ft.

4. If at this point the object is no longer visible on the screen, don't panic -- this is what usually happens at this point. Here are two ways to get the thing back where you can see it.

Switch cameras to the 'Directors Camera' and then MOVE (CTRL-F8) the object back into the viewable area of the scene camera, or

Select MOVE (CTRL-F8) then press the letter 'N.' This will allow you to choose the object by name. If you don't have any other objects it is readily apparent what object is the stairs polygon, as opposed to any lights that may be in the scene.

The resultant object looks like the bottom right image.

Page 2 of 'The Spiral Stair Case Tutorial

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