How To: Make a spiral staircase
- tr3lon1st
- 2. Sept. 2016
- 3 Min. Lesezeit
Today we will take a closer look at how to create a spiral staircase. If you ever wanted to add spiral stairs to your build and didn't know how - this is a tutorial for you!
The execution of this project requires a board created by Fredelas and Nordri. There is an older version by Nordri that will work just as well, though if you are looking for bigger stairs and a cleaner cut, the newer version will be more suitable.
We first require the length of the staircase you want to create. Let's say you have a tower with a 30 block wide inner space. That would require the staircase to be 15 blocks wide. The newer version of the board doesn't have the first three blocks, so we will mentally add that to the selection we make. In the example below, I have decided to make a 15 block wide staircase, which means that my selection spanned 12 blocks (+ 3 imaginary blocks):
We now determine the shape of one stair. This is not as intuitive as it might look. We trace the shape by looking at the complete color patches we can find. Only complete color pieces will work out as clean stairs. To illustrate what I am talking about, I have provided two examples below. The one on the left will work, the one on the right will not:
This selection allows us to make two stairs. The picture on the right seems to work as well, but the narrowest part of these four stairs cannot be separated like that. The blocks can simply not cleanly bend to create the necessary shapes. The color patches are an indicator of what does and what doesn't work. So make sure that the stairs you create contain complete color patches.
Without trying to make things complicated right at the start, you could just leave out the blocks at the narrow end, thereby creating a selection with only complete blocks. The final result will simply have a bigger gap in the center of the staircase.
However, we will remain with the example up top on the left. The basic principle is that we copy out the stair line by line. We select the first line, copy it (CTRL + C) and paste it above the board:
Now we repeat that with every part of the stair. Make sure that you don't accidentally start selecting parts of the second stair!
Once you have copied all the blocks of one stair to another level, you will get a better idea of how we are getting closer to the spiral staircase. You will now repeat the same thing with the second stair but you will paste that one block above the level you just pasted the first stair. As soon as you are done with the second stair, make a selection of both stairs:
Copy and paste it back into the world. Make sure you rotate it horizontally twice and vertically twice. Now rotate it into position so that it continues the staircase in the same manner these two staircases already intiated:
We now have a quarter of a spiral staircase. We can now copy and paste that quarter of a spiral staircase and rotate it to fit in the same fashion as we did before. We have now created half a spiral staircase, which we can copy and paste to make a complete circle:
The final result can now be painted in a single texture or according to its color patterns in different textures. To illustrate what I mean, I have provided an overlay version, that shows the previous color patches on top of the staircase painted with two colors:
