Canfield Research Group LLC

Stairs are very useful and confusing. I encountered numerous strange cases where they didn’t seem to work, stopped working or suddenly changed. After a lot of experimentation I developed the following rules. Understanding these has made made creating stairs much easier.

Rules

• Stairs should be drawn from the current location (lower) up to the target location (upper).
• Often stairs cannot be draw on wall edges properly. Simply move to the center of the room, draw the stairs int he proper direction for a few steps, then move/rotate the stairs as needed and finish dragging the end to create the height desired.
• Stairs will automatically cut out a hole in the ceiling just below the target location and the target location’s floor.
  • WARNING : The holes are cut based on the ending position of the stair not the starting position. The starting location’s ceiling is only cut if the location immediately above is also the target location.
  • The ceiling and/or floor of the locations with the stairs may not update properly to reflect the hole cut out by FloorPlan. Either save/load the drawing or move a wall on the location to force and update.
  • Ceilings are only cut out on the starting location. Any intermediate ceilings the stairway crosses must be manually removed. This can usually be done with invisible walls to form a room at the appropriate location and position then remove the ceiling in the 3D view or via Drawing Info tab.
  • If there is a wall below the target location that collides with the hole that would be cut the hole will not appear. See examples below.
  • If the cut-out does not appear then it is probably caused by a multiple locations at the same floor level. Verify that all locations are at the proper heights.
• WARNING : Removing a floor that the stairway originally intersect with will cause a bug to appear. A floor the size of the hole that would have been created is made over the staircase! It is almost as if FloorPlan used a boolean NOT operator to cut the hole in the floor, which if there is no floor would create one!
• There may be intermediate locations between the lower and upper locations allowing stairs to rise by more than one location. The rules to allow this are
• Only room Floors cause collisions, ceilings are ignored.
• Stairs forcibly end upon the first location with a floor that intersected. They cannot be extended beyond that point. If they are, through trickery, extended FloorPlan will adjust them at its first opportunity.
• WARNING : If a stairway is drawn that passes though a location because it lacks a floor and later a floor is added to that location then FloorPlan will automatically reduce the stairway to the height of the new floor! This usually updated on the scree when Plan view is selected but may not happen until a reload of the plan.
• At each location above the starting location a check is done for a floor. If the angle of the stair intersects the floor then the stair will terminate at that location.
• If there is no floor at this intersection the stair will continue to the next location
  • It is possible to get a stair to go through a wall after passing into at least one location. Stairs only do collision against objects and walls on the starting location, after that only floors collisions are detected.
  • If multiple locations match (two or more locations with the same floor height) FloorPlan will choose one. The user has no reliable control over which is chosen. Even worse FloorPlan may change which location it cuts upon an editing any walls on the location or editing the stairs.
  • There is no Cut-Off by Location setting like that found for roofs (see also Roof Rules (aka The Way of the Roof)). It would be VERY nice if there was.
• NOTE : Do not confuse locations with floors. A location is defined by FloorPlan using the location settings. Floors (and ceilings) are an attribute of a room (3 or more walls enclosing a space). See also Walls, rooms, floors, ceilings.
• When stairs cut through a floor there is a void between the ceiling of the current location and the floor of the target location. This void appears as a solid gray zero width wall. It has no material settings.
  • Walls can be placed on each side of a stair to deal with the void. Optionally create a wall that spans the void, by default 12” but based on the location settings.
    1. Start at bottom location + ceiling height, Height = distance to bottom of target floor
1. Upper Location floor : Start at floor level – distance to lower floor, Height = distance between floors.
• FloorPlan will automatically adjust the stair rises so that the top of the stair cuts exactly into the target location floor.
  • The step rise used is always equal to or less than the rise specified such that the stairs cut into the target location’s floor.
  • If the stairs are left hanging, not reaching a floor, then the rise is not changed.
  • Example: Two locations differ by 9’ (108”) from floor to floor. A stair of 17” (BIG steps) is added. FloorPlan will adjust the stair rise to be 1’ 3 3/8” (15 3/8”) which becomes 6 steps (7 rises) extending to 107.625”.
• I suspect internally FloorPlan has enough precision to make the measurement exact although it is limited to 1/8” when displaying. OR it adjusts the first or last step by a small amount to match. In any case these do not appear to be visible.
• WARNING : If FloorPlan is not terminating stairs upon encounter the floor above then you may have encountered a bug. Edit the stairs starting location and adjust the Floor Level my +1”, exit the dialog box then repeat the process to restore the old Floor Level value. Finally delete and re-add the stairs. This usually does the trick.

• Remember that the first floor encountered by the stairs will be the terminating floor. So be sure there is not some rogue floor in the way. A good check is to turn off the target location via the Display Tab and see if there is still a floor visible. If there is then a hole will have to be manually cut into the floor (invisible walls work well for this) or delete the floor.

Examples

The images shown here use the Invisible setting in the Photo Advanced materials tab to hide the front wall for rendered views. See also Hiding wall trim for additional details of this setting.

This image shows a single stairway from the ground to the third floor, see also for an angle view. There are 3 locations; ground, second and third. The ceilings are white and the floors are sky blue. A number of anomalies are illustrated with this single image:

• The stair starts at Ground Floor location and ends at the Third Floor location.
• The second floor is ignored since it does not have a floor defined in the area the stair intersects that location.
• The stair crosses through the wall on the second floor because collision detection is only active between stairs and walls/objects on the starting location.
• The stair does not cut through the ceiling on the Ground Floor. In this example the Ground Floor is not the floor immediately below the target location (_Third Floor_).
• The Third Floor does not have a cut out in the floor because the wall below prevents this. The wall on the Second Floor collides with the hole that FloorPlan wants to create on the Third Floor so no hole is created. If the wall is moved slightly to the left opening enough space for the stairway a hole will be cut: .
• This image ( shows the image after corrections where made; Second Floor wall adjusted to avoid collision with Third Floor and to be out of the way of the stairs, ceiling removed from Ground Floor by the use of invisible walls to form a fake room. Note that the Ground Floor ceiling is silly since there is no floor above it, but it does work as an example. The cut-out for the ceiling area is approximate and the floor is set to the same material as the other floors on the Ground Floor and the ceiling was deleted.

• REMEMBER : Invisible walls are useful for removing sections of floors or ceilings from a location. Just create a room the size of the cut you want and delete the floor and/or ceiling from this room.

Tricks

Adjusting the location Floor level

• If a location is not at the proper position and you have objects on it you may find a copy the easiest way to fix the problem.
  1. Create a new location at the proper height. Name it anything you like as the name will be changed later.
  2. Select the new location and check the copy check box and the location to be moved from the drop down.
  3. Select the original location
  4. Select all elements on this location.
  • Do NOT use Ctrl-A unless the Display Filter is set to show only this location, otherwise ALL shown objects (even on other locations) will be selected.
  5. Delete all objects on the old location
  6. Delete the old location

1. Rename the new location as desired

On the Plan view stairs have some visual cues that are handy to know about

• When drawing stairs they will be forcible stopped when FloorPlan detects that the stair has reached the first floor (a location with a floor defined) that is above the current location.

• Stairs appear in green) while being drawn and when selected.

• When the stair is unselected (press _ESC) the graphic changes
  • Blue indicates the stairway is long enough to reach the target location.
  • Black indicates a partial stairway, it has failed to meet up with a floor.

• Two Grey dashed lines bisecting the stairs indicate where FloorPlan has cut the the hole in the ceiling of the starting location and floor of the target location. There will be a gray line at the end of the stairway and one before that. These are not always visible but usually appear on locations that are above the stairway starting location.

To create a set of stairs that can run through multiple locations delete all floors (easily one via the Drawing Info tab) between the source and target. This can be used to create a stairway that spans two or more stores.