Special top rail shape and baluster issue

[jtcapa1]

This is odd, but I cannot find an easy fix to this issue.

The old cheapo deck railing on the outside of the rim using basic 2x2 pickets.

This means we use a 2X4 or 2X6 top rail and a 2X4 or 1x4 vertical inside top rail piece.

So since CA does not allow any offsetting of the middle rail  to create this vertical piece I had to draw a custom top rail, as shown in the picture.

Unfortunately, the balusters will only go up to the bottom of this custom shape, leaving a gap.

 

I know there are many ways to get this to work, maybe with a 3d molding top rail over the same railing with no top rail, but you guys might have a better suggestion?

This is how I want it to look without having to monkey around with all the various settings and work-arounds.

Just getting those balusters tight to the rim joists was a real pain of incremental dragging.

 

[glennw]

This is one I did years ago using a molding polyline with a 3D Symbol Molding for the pickets and 2 x rectangular moldings for the top rails.

This way, everything is attached to the one polyline - but, of course it is not a Chief railing.

There may be better ways to do this now.

 

 

 

[robdyck]

14 hours ago, jtcapa1 said:

but I cannot find an easy fix to this issue

I think the easiest would be to use a molding polyline for the rails and a distribution polyline for the pickets. A more advanced exercise is to build a railing type and save it to your library. This requires creating a symbol for the pickets and handrail and is a brutal process of guessing and checking with symbol offsets, stretch planes and bounding boxes.

[MarkMc]

23 hours ago, jtcapa1 said:

Unfortunately, the balusters will only go up to the bottom of this custom shape, leaving a gap.

You can get around that by altering the bounding box. For these I lowered the Z origin and shortened the bounding box.

I also used a molding stack for the top rail which helps a bit with material direction.

I used transform replicate to get it to the edge of the rim. All of that was easy enough....

 

No matter what I tried there is an issue at one corner ( there might be a way to fix it but I got tired and would just add a  single post if I needed it.)

Gets a bit more complicated if you want newel posts

[jtcapa1]

On 10/8/2022 at 7:16 AM, robdyck said:

This requires creating a symbol for the pickets and handrail and is a brutal process of guessing and checking with symbol offsets, stretch planes and bounding boxes.

I agree this was brutal, but it did allow me to create a symbol with 4 different objects which can be painted 4 different ways.

 

 

Yes. It can be done in one step if you first create a symbol, but the railing is then a polyline.  It can be done with more work using CA railing and a molding polyline.  But the ASK for CA is to give us more controls in the railing dialogs to make this possible to do as shown.

Edited October 13, 2022 by jtcapa1
On point