The Railings, exactly like the stairs, are an important part of a building and used in many areas of it: balconies, decks, windows, roofs, stairs, and more.

In all these cases the support of the railing is different. It can be a concrete slab, concrete, steel or wood beam, a wall, basically any type of support.

Therefore, it can be very difficult to find the right way to build the railing without having the right support element.

Having this in mind, Graitec has developed the Railings macros available in the PowerPack for Advance Steel to be created independently of a support element.

Why is that possible and how? Because the Railing macros are designed to have 3 types of input! Each time a type of railing is created, the first thing that the user must define is the input type.

The input of the Graitec Railings can be: Points, Beams, Lines.

The “Beams” input is the most limited one, because to create the railing, beams must be selected. Therefore, if no beams are available for selection, no railing is created.  Also, the shape described by the beams will be the railing shape. For example, curved railings cannot be created using beams as input.

This type of input is used especially for stairs with stringers made from straight beams, or on areas, like the platforms which the contour is made with beams.

The second input type, much more flexible than beams, is “Lines”. The selected lines can be straight, arc or polyline. The lines are offering a lot of flexibility, allowing to create different shapes of railings with multiple configurations.

The railing shape will be the one defined by the line/polyline shape. Creating curved railings will be as easy as the straight ones.

The third type of input “Points”, as the Lines, is offering a lot of flexibility and gives the user the possibility to build the railing directly where he needs it. No other preliminary preparation is needed, like creating beams or lines. Just to pay attention at the selected points.

The railing shape will be the one defined by the selected points. 

The most important benefits of the Lines and Points input types are:

• The railing can be created wherever we need in the building, and can be manage outside of the big model, where the full structure is created.
• Multiple railing shape, straight, curved, mix of both.
• No specific type of input is needed.

In the end, having multiple types of input to create the railings is offering infinite possibilities.