Stair paths- How to connect floors through stairs
- Benjamin Malchus
- Kinga Walaszek
Please make sure you've read and understood the documentation in How do I create a path? before you proceed with this page.
Usually, buildings consist of more than one floor, and they are connected by stairs and elevators. This document will explain you how we connect two floors of a building by drawing a path through stairs.
Nowadays, we use mainly automated path generation as it is much quicker and easier. However it is good to know how to connect stairs manually as well.
Automatic Path Generation
On the left bar we have Automatic Path Generation menu. It has 4 different options, but to create stairs we use option called Generate paths between floors in building. This option allows us to connect stairs (and elevators) in the whole building just by one click! It’s very important so every stair polygon had a path node (marked in red circle). Because of that it can be connected within all floorplans. Polygons without nodes will be skipped by the system.
After creating nodes in stair polygons, we need to click on Generate paths between floors in building and stairs will be connected on all floors.
Automatically generated stair path can be also modified like a regular path.
More information about modyfying paths can be found below.
Manual Path Generation
Please watch the video and read through the steps below for a detailed description.
As learned before, you will start to draw a path by selecting the “Draw Path”-mode by either selecting it in “Quick Paths Tools” box or just by pressing “D” on the keyboard.
A green node will appear on the map, which will be your source node and you start drawing the stair path from the node right in front of the stairs.
Please confirm this by clicking on the node. You will see that the green node will become yellow which will stick to the position you've chosen and in addition a new green node will appear. This is the target node, which needs to be placed on the other floor to connect them with each other.
Continue by dragging the green node (target node) to a spot on the stairs and confirm this with a left click. Next, you have to switch to the floor the path is going to. In our example this will be floor 5. You can achieve this by choosing the right floor on the floor level bar in the left corner.
The map should automatically switch to the chosen floor (floor 5 in our example), and you can continue to draw the path on this floor.
If a stair is not straight and makes turns you can click on every turn to switch the directions.
Finally, connect the path to the path network of the floor (the fifth floor in our example) by placing the green target node on a path on this floor and confirm the placement with a click. You should also press “Enter” now to end drawing paths. The green target node will become yellow and the path which was just drawn will become green as you can see below.
But you are not done yet. Please select the path, which is connecting the two floors and select the path type “Stairs” in the page properties as you can see below. By default the path type “Obstruction for wheelchairs” will also be ticked because this will later be relevant for the live map. You should always have this ticked for stairs but you should untick this for e.g. ramps.
Please do not forget to save the changes you've made by clicking on the “Save changes”-button.
Your stair path will look like the following. The end node which is placed on another floor will be indicated by a green circle including an arrow which points up or down, depending on which floor you are.
Clicking on the arrow will jump to the floor where the path is leading to and therefor to the end of the path.
Some useful tips can be found below:
While creating a stair connection be careful and try not to click on already existing stair path, because you may connect them incorrectly.
Sometimes it may be difficult because our system automatically drags a new path to already existing one. To avoid that please change the snap distance to lower value.
Important: The path will only appear on the map when clicking on “Publish Map”.
Do you have more questions? Feel free to reach out to us by sending a request to support@mazemap.com.