Are you ready to put into practice all your incredible skills to create something great? How about an extraordinary piece of minimalist architecture? Here you’ll learn how to build a staircase with floating steps in Blender!
Before starting, remember that there’s no unique way to create or transform a model; everything depends on what you think fits you better and the skills you are improving daily.
Go ahead! Firstly, the main recommendation is to have a basic model of stairs, preferably created by the Extrude Tool. Once you have it, delete all those elements you don’t need. For that, verify you are in Edit Mode, go to the Wireframe View, and press three (3) on your keyboard to access the Right Orthographic View. Now remove the rectangles and leave only the steps on top: press X on your keyboard to bring up the Deleting Menu and select the “Faces” option.
As you can see, each step seems to be an individual piece, but be careful, they are still part of a single object. To solve this, we can use the Loop Cut Tool: press Ctrl + R to activate it and make a little cut between each point where the vertices are connected.
Tip: If you want to be more accurate with your cuts, you can turn on the great snap toggle by clicking on the magnet icon in the center of your screen just below the principal menu.
You can return to Solid Mode to select the little loops you made to delete them. You’ll find the faces below are gone. Take it easy. You can fill it by choosing the edges of the figure and pressing F as many times as you need to fill all holes.
How fancy! But it still needs one essential part: the figure connecting the floating steps. Don’t worry. Just press Ctrl + A and select a cube and rotate it (Remember to do it in Edit mode, so when you return to the Object Mode, the rotation value of the object won’t change). Press S (to scale) + Z (Don’t change the weight on the Z axis) and lengthen the cube until you feel comfortable with the result. You can use all the tools you know to modify it.
There you have it! This is just one way to create floating steps, but another technique would be by making independent mesh objects and grouping them as a whole model. Anyway, if you can imagine it, you can do it!