Special top rail shape and baluster issue


jtcapa1
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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?

TopRailGap.jpg

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.

 

TopRailNoGap.jpg

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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.

 

Screen Shot 2022-10-08 at 10.38.35 am.jpg

 

 

Screen Shot 2022-10-08 at 10.44.04 am.jpg

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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.

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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.

1480579425_Boundingboxes.thumb.jpg.272770806b5a014fa9ff38b88c0b6703.jpg

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

image.thumb.png.e9658bd4525cd6d27b7a8796cf3038c1.png

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.)

image.thumb.png.7ed577d6fe58d083a301345f49f25178.png

Gets a bit more complicated if you want newel posts

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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.

 

Railing2x2Symbol.jpg

 

Railing2x2SymbolColored.jpg

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 by jtcapa1
On point
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