LD sorry if this goes a bit to step by step:

Grab the floor template for the stairs and texture it onto a flat plane in SKU then cut the plane in half as we can mirror the other side (yes my texture is grabbed of a promo picy I dont have the set yet):



measure down the required amount and In the required amount for the width of the stairs then place a curve between the two points and bend he curve so it closely matchs the template curve, if it's an odd shaped curve you may need to select a mid point and do two curves:



Now select the right side surface and pull it up to the height needed at a guess 3"? make a copy of the geometry so far and paste it somewere on the screen then mark the stairs onto the surface, best to measure these from photoshop/Gimp or something , I guessed below (you can also remove the texture).
Use the push pull tool to lower each stair to the required height, that gives you half a basic staircase:



Banister Rail
Grab the copy you made and push/pull the height so it's at the max height of the rail 3.5"? select the bottom edge and use the move tool to drop it down to the height of the rail at the bottom of the stairs (you should have the below roughly):



Now copy the inside curve (you may need to goto View>>Hidden geometry and select each segment separately):



Now place the banister surface onto the inside curve of your stairs, the stairs will poke through a little( pic 1 left) simply select the whole lot and right click and do Intersect>>intersect selected, now you can delete the overhanging geometry and end up with clean half a staircase (pic 2right):



Now copy and paste your finished geometry and flip it and match the two halfs up remove the center seam and texture/colour:

Thanks for the instructions. I've got to see if I can find the time to try it myself some time tonight.

I started work on the stairs, but I've encountered a problem when attempting to do the verticle curve for the banisters.

http://wwgallery.pcinfoman.com/displayi ... ?pos=-4644

When I move that front edge down only part of the top plain comes with it. Any ideas why?

When I drew mine I assumed the inside was one long continuous curve but it looks like it's a smaller curve with two box's on the ends sorry

Similar process just way more annoying to build:

raise it upto the height of the bannister at the bottom of the top flight of stairs, at a guess just under the 3" ?mark (about were the line is in your picy, the line below the 3 in the 2nd pic down - i really should have put a 4 in ).



Now lower 1 in the picy below first then lower 2 then increase the height of 3, it might take a bit of fiddling to get a nice even curve.



then just copy paste the inside curve and continue as above if needed duplicate flip and texture



Hopefully it'll work

Thanks for the help. I didn't get it quite as nice as yours, but it came out pretty well. That corner section actually had to be adjusted in more places then yours. I basically had to do it every where the verticle lines intersected that curve.



Do you happen to know how to change the default file save format in paint? I noticed that mine has been saving everything as a bitmap instead of a jpeg and its wasting all my WW gallery space.

I bet its part of the size problem with my textured sketchup models as well. I was converting the pdfs in Gimp but for some reason SKU doesn't see the GIMP jpeg files I exported, so I had to do them with paint.

So long as Paint isn't uping the 72 dpi resolution I'm not worried about it. I can do pdf conversions in Paint much faster than with GIMP anyway. I was just trying to use GIMP because I could set the resolution there.

I've been trying to add textures to the stair and the curved section just won't texture properly.

On the left you see what happens when I try to paint. But if I were to select the curve section with the arrow the entire surface comes up as a single piece.

Anyone know what I should try?

LD, theres a section in the help files about texturing curves, but i haven't looked at sketchup it for a month or two (work/house etc). From memory basically each plane of the the curve has to be textured individually and you align the texture as you go so they match up with the previous and the next plane.

If the above makes no sense and you can't find the help file I'll go poking around.

have fun

One of the things I tried while working with it was to soften all the individual sections so its now it comes up as a single face. Is there a was to reverse that so that I can paint each portion of the face?

Or do I have to reproduce the curve?

yes there is a show faces option, under view there is a "turn on hidden geometry" option put that on then you can texture the indivdual faces.



below is a shot of the textured arch I did for CWU:




here I just found this post which would seem to indicate a quicker way

http://groups.google.com/group/SketchUp ... 82c347607e

Gluck

PS - LD I'm holding you peronally responsible for getting me hooked back on sketchup

I'm having more problems with these stairs.

One is this stucco wall in the small room on the bottom left. I'm trying to apply a pink section to only the small wall. But no matter what that entire 9" wall at the back of the stairs textures as one, except for that staggered chunk at the middle top of the wall. I've drawn a new square on the wall, tried to use the intersect feature, nothing. Any ideas?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/18847547@N04/2072297711/" title="wall error by wwg2062, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2288/2072297711_101d080779_o.jpg" width="690" height="380" alt="wall error" /></a>

The other is weirder. On the steps themselves pieces keep disappearing. Usually a triangular bit at the inside edge of the highest step. When I draw a line portions of the missing section reappear but trying to enclose the missing area in lines just makes it move. But when I exported a picture of the problem the resulting jpeg had no errors.