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680 | ChapteR 15 Creating StairS and railingS

Important Best practices
here are some best practices to consider with regard to creating complex stairs and railings:

◆ ◆ don’t forget to nest your family components whenever possible and appropriate. This will keep
the components together when associated with some other template that contains hardwired
parameters and reference planes. it will also save you time during design changes and iteration.
◆ ◆ don’t struggle with creating the stairs in this chapter. if you get stuck, you can download the
sample stairs from this chapter’s files and use them for a starting point when creating your
custom stair. Just remember, it’s usually easier to build and test a custom stair or railing in a
sample project first. Then copy and paste or use transfer Project Standards to get the custom
stair or railing from the test project to your actual project. download sample files for this
document at the book’s website. you’ll probably want to copy your custom stairs and railings
in an easy-to-access project that contains several finished examples (since they can’t be kept
as family components).
◆ ◆ The level of detail and visibility is crucial if you care about graphic refresh times and printing.
as you model the components of your custom stairs and railings, assign appropriate orienta-
tion and level of detail (Coarse, medium, or Fine). you’ll notice a difference when you pan and
rotate your model.
◆ ◆ take care to filter schedules. Using a curtain wall as a railing may have certain advantages,
but you also want to make sure your curtain wall schedules are filtered to exclude these types
of elements.
overall, be careful when reaching into your bag of tips and tricks! you need to weigh the cost
of implementing a new process against the cost of doing what’s familiar. make sure that you’re
maintaining a balance between predictability and efficiency. There are frequently two extremes that
you need to avoid:
◆ ◆ High predictability; low efficiency. most people will grasp the solution that you intend to
implement; they’ll fully understand the technology and technique. But they’ll also quickly
realize that managing design changes and iteration will be highly manual and time con-
suming. and the rest of the team will doubt your leadership and understanding of the
technology and processes.
◆ ◆ High efficiency; low predictability. The solution will be very efficient to manage the design,
but only you or a few team members will understand what you’ve created. everyone else on
the team will resist making any changes to your creation out of fear that they’ll break it.
So, what’s important with creating interesting and innovative stairs and railings is that you manage
to strike a balance between these two extremes. Just remember these four simple characteristics:
Beneficial not just to you, but to the project team
efficient implementation and changes that are fast and predictable
elegant Understood by the team and by any new team members
Repeatable Can be used on many projects

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