help with staircase model

[cakewalkr7]

I am trying to create a casing to go around my spiral staircase that I created. I have been able to create the sides, but I can't figure out how to create the floor surface for it. Right now, it's just an extruded editable spline. Anyone have any ideas (from the attached picture)? Thanks.

[ipxstudios]

here's a neat plugin for Max that might do it.

 

 

http://www.itoosoft.com/english/menu.php?id=clone

[cakewalkr7]

I'm sorry if that was confusing. Actually, I already modeled the stairs themselves with the array tool. Although I like the ability of this plugin to be able to edit the instances scale, position, etc after they're placed, there seems to be a bug with it. When I tried to create the stairs with it and had them rotate around a central point, by the time I got to 180 degrees rotation, I had a few inches of gap between each piece where the first ones started tight against each other.

 

Anyway, after walking away from this for awhile, I realized that since I had the splines for the bottom of the casing, all I should need to do is just use the bottom 2 splines and connect them to make basically a twisted rectangle. Then apply an extrude modifier. I tried that and it somewhat worked. As you can see from the image, it seems I'm having a problem with my normals. I've tried flipping them, toggling backface cull but I still can't get them to show up on both sides. The only way that I can seem to get it to show up on both sides is to create a new material and check the 2-sided option. I guess that will work in the end since I'll be applying a material anyway... but I'm just curious as to why it isn't working the way I expected. Thanks.

[maryam]

you can also add shell modifier to your model.to see the polygons.