Day: 1 September 2021

Drawing a Spiral Staircase in SketchUp Step by Step

Here’s a step-by-step guide to the basic process of drawing a spiral staircase in SketchUp:

• Create a circle.

• Choose the number of sides your circle should have, which simply defines the number of steps you need.

• Bear in mind that in this case, the radius is the width of the stairs.

• Create a segment with lines leading to two points on the radius.

• Delete all of the circle except this segment you’ve made, which represents one step on your staircase.

• Give this wedge shape depth to represent the thickness of the steps.

• Make this into a SketchUp Component.

• For a 12 step spiral, create a series of 11 copies of your wedge. For staircases with different numbers of steps, adjust the number of copy wedges you make.

• Now, move and copy the wedge to recreate the layer 11 times.

• Shift-click to select each steps in the spiral staircase.

• Hold ‘Shift’ and drag a box around the whole stack of wedges to deselect your previously selected wedges and select the remainder, the unwanted ones.

• Hit delete and all but the steps you want disappear, leaving you with a set of basic spiral steps.

• You can go back through the process to retrace your actions, adjusting things like the spacing between each step, the number of steps, their dimensions and so on.

Because you created a defined component early on, it’s a simple matter to add a handrail.

Spiral Staircase with a Central Void

It’s just as easy to adapt these basic steps and create spiral stairs around a circular central void, and the process you go through is much the same:

• Start by creating two nested circles around the same centre.

• The outer circle represents the full diameter of your spiral and the inner circle is the diameter of the central void.

• As before, make wedge shapes and delete all of them except  the shape you want to keep.

• Turn your finished wedge into a SketchUp component and copy it until you’ve got the number of steps you want.

• Copy and stack the layers to make the steps then select the actual steps in the stack.

• Select the whole design, which deselects the required steps.

• Press delete to remove all the steps except the ones you want

Spiral Staircase Using ‘Memory Copy’ Extension

How about using the Memory Copy extension to make a spiral staircase in SketchUp? Bear in mind the memory copy extension is simply used to repeat copy operations. The process is much the same as the step by step method we’ve showed you:

• Create your SketchUp component for one step.

• Carry out one copy operation.

• Click ‘play it again’ to repeat the copy operation for each step.

All you’re doing is repeating the operation performed on this step component. And as before, since your steps are components, it’s really easy to add handrails.

Spiral Staircase Using ‘1001Bit Tools’ Extension

If you want to draw spiral stairs super-simply, you’ll enjoy the 1001Bit Tools extension. It’s basically a SketchUp spiral staircase plugin that includes a built-in spiral staircase option. All you do is Select ‘Create Spiral Staircase’, then enter the details and it does all the work for you. That’s it! The spiral staircase plugin extension supports a variety of common spiral staircase designs, so it’s extremely flexible as well as fast.