Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Building Stairs: The Divide and Conquer Method

Talk to any carpenter and she'll tell you, you won't enjoy designing and building stairs unless you like geometry and division. To build stairs in the real world, you need to:

• Measure the horizontal distance the stairs travel.

• Measure the vertical distance the stairs travel.

  

  Figure 7-23. Top: Before reorganizing with nested groups, your Outliner looks like one long laundry list. Bottom: By nesting some groups inside others, you create a nested outline. This structure adds logic to the outline, making it easier to select, hide, and work with the groups and components.

• Determine the angle and the angled distance the stairs travel.

• Determine the number of steps the stairs require.

• Calculate the vertical distance between the steps, known as the rise.

• Calculate the horizontal distance between the steps, known as the run.

If that doesn't sound like fun to you, perhaps you aren't among that group of humans who enjoy geometry and division. In that case, you'll love how SketchUp does the work of stair building for you. The tool that does the hard work is the Divide command. Once you know the horizontal and vertical distances the stairs span, SketchUp does all the other calculations automatically. Keep in mind that when you build stairs, you need to follow the standards for your community; see the box on the next page.

In this example, the stairs reach ...