Modelling a staircase in Maya

Firstly what I did was insert a polygon cylinder. I flattened it and made it larger to make it into a circlular shape and then in the Attribute editor, in the polyCylinder1 tab I increased the Subdivisions Axis to 40. Next I went to the Top view, went into Face mode and selected half of the faces, pressed W and pulled them out to the right. Then I went into Edge mode and selected all of the inside edges and deleted them. This would become my base step.

After that I went into the Side view, selected all the edges and then shift-drag selected the middle edges so that they were deselected and that only the bottom and top edges were selected. Then I went back into the Perspective view and clicked on "Edit Mesh" and then "Bevel" and I changed the Segments to 10 and the Offset to 0.8.

Next I went into Face mode and selected the face on the underside of the shape, then I went into "Edit Mesh" and "Extrude", pressed W and moved the face down a bit. Then I went into the PCylinder1 tab in the Attribute Editor and made sure that all the Translate values were set to 0. Next I went into "Edit" then scrolled down to "Delete by type" and then "History".

Then to make the next step, I inserted a polygon cube and made it larger, making it into a rectangular shape. Now for this next part I created the step differently to what was shown in the tutorial I watched, as what the person was doing wasn't working for me and in my opinion my way is easier and it still works. So firstly I went into Face mode and selected the top face of the rectangle and used the Extrude tool to move it up, then on the extended face, I selected the front face and still using the Extrude tool I moved it out a little bit. I then went into Edge mode and deleted the edges around the extended front face so that the step was just one object and will make it easier to resize later on. I then selected the bottom and top edges of the extended face and bevelled them so the step was more rounded.

Next I went into the Top view and moved the step onto the base and adjusted the position of the step so that it was near the edge of the base and I also resized the step by pressing R so that the step was long enough. Then I went into the Side view panel and selected the step and duplicated it 12 times and moved each of the steps into position so that they created one staircase. Next I selected the back edges on the the top step and and extended them out, then I selected the left and right facesof the top step, pressed R and I scaled them out, so now the top step was more like a platform.

After that, I selected the step underneath the top step and duplicated it, then I moved it onto the platform, pressed E and rotated it 90 degress so that the step so was facing left and then I moved it to the edge of the platform. Next I duplicated that step 9 times and positioned them so that they formed another case- these would be my right set of stairs.

Now I wanted to create my left set of stairs, so I drag-selected my right set of stairs, went into "Mesh" and then "Combine" so that they all became one object. Then I pressed Ctrl+D to duplicated the stairs, moved them out and then I pressed E to rotated the duplicated stairs so that they faced the opposite direction to my right set of stairs and then I moved and positioned the duplicated stairs onto the platform.

My stairs were now done but now I focused my attention into creating the railing. So firstly I decided to create the polls for the railing and I did this by inserting a polygon cylinder and enlarged it. Then in the Poly Cylinder History, I changed the the Subdivisions Axis value to 40 and I changed the value of the Subdivisions Height to 10. Then I pressed R and scaled the cylinder in to make it thin then I stretched it out, next I went into the Side view and moved the cylinder onto the first step. I then resized the cylinder further so that it was the right size for the step.

This was as far as I got into making the staircase, but it was quite easy so far which was enjoyable as I'm still trying to get used to Maya and all I had to do mostly was just resize and duplicate the objects. This also promted me to use the different viewing planes more to make modelling easier.