Problem building stairs.
 

Hi. Im trying to build stairs for a temple. And I did a quick version that I soon realized will be impossible to texture. And I cant figure out a smart way to create this kind of stairs without manually extruding face per face all the way up. Im gonna have to make a lot of stairs in this type so Im asking if someone has a neat trick maybe =P.

Heres my stair. I need it like this but all connected as one mesh (like all edges/vertices merged).

For this I created 3 steps, deformed them a bit individually and duplicate special them down.

Thankful for advice.

/Richard

just out of curiosity why do they all have to be connected?

Because the side of the steps has to (at least appear) as one huge face with seperate texture. Right now there are like 40 tiny faces that I cant sew together with eachother.

I think I know what you're trying to do and there are several ways to do it.

If I understand what you're trying to do correctly and where you're hung up at what you may not have done is combine you're several smaller polygon meshes into one BIG mesh. That may be why you can't sew the UV's together. Technically they're not the same mesh. You could select them all and go to Mesh --> combine. But you'll have to go in and line up vertices and merge them so they come out nice and neat. Then you can go and make your UV maps for the big mesh.

OR

What I would do is take the original three steps you created and unwrap those three so you have a map. After you have those three mapped out you can duplicate them to make the rest of the stairs and all of the duplicates will automatically have the map laid out like the originals. Then when it comes time to finish the map you can just move everything about until you have it laid out like you want without having to unwrap each single step.

Hope this helps!

Ok I built the inner steps in 2 minutes....first I just made a cube to experiment with. I then duplicated and shifted in Y to JUST below the top of first cube...I then took note of the Y distance and tried that in duplicate special...X and Z scale at 0.9 and Y scale @ 1 I then Y translate the distance I noted. This didnt work entirely as the blocks were not on top of each other but seperated. I then just played with the Y translate until they sat on top of each other..with a little overlap. I set dup>special to 5 as a test...and presto it worked. You could delete the bottom face as it isnt needed...I assume CG that after UV the first one...the dups should have the UV laid out as per your instructions?? You could do this with the other steps...then maybe use 'cut faces' to delete ones not required.

cheers bullet

EDIT ok found a glitch...doing it my way will not give an even slope....so that wont work...you may have to script something to get the slope to be even and not convex, concave...sorry mate I tried.

Yep! The duplicated mesh will have the same UV layout as the mesh it was duplicated from. Then it becomes a matter of moving the UV's around in the UV texture editor so that you don't have the meshes overlapping. The good news is that small tweaks to the new mesh will update its UV layout. So using split polygon tool and insert edgeloop will automatically update the UV layout. BUT you have to be careful with extrusions because it wont automatically flatten out the extrusion so you can see all sides of the new extrusion in the UV texture editor.

Hope this makes sense

Thanks a lot guys. Yeah i think i will do it something like u did bullet, not quite sure yet. Maybe even just make the top and do the sides with append polygon (since its really the sides that are the problem). But at least Im not as stupid as I thought =P. Was not so easy. Ill try again later.

Cheers!