There's an easier and more accurate way to add the bottom of the railing

[Rhitt_Chakravarty]

In this lecture, the instructor added the bottom of the railings by extruding the face and then using the properties panel to align it to when z=0. But, there is a much simpler and accurate way to do this without even touching the properties panel! Also, this prevents extra geometry at the bottom.

This method uses “snap by increment”.

1. Select the top edges of the bottom face of the railing:

2. Select snap by “increment”:

3. Extrude the edges diagonally to the red x-axis:

4. Now, just simply press “F” multiple times until you fill in the gaps:

And it"s done! Simple!

[albesca]

Your solution only works if the shape you need has specific measures: say my steps are 1.32 meters high, the snap by increment will fall at either 1 or 2 meters (or if you zoom in enough, 1.3 or 1.4 meters).
For a case where snap by increment wouldn’t work at all you can try to simply rotate the default starting cube on an edge by 45 degrees, then try to build the wedge your way.

This is the shape I’m talking about:

To get this I extruded the lower face beyond the plane at z=0 and then applied a boolean intersect modifier with a plane that I then deleted.

This is the setup before removing the unneeded vertices: