Draw it in SketchUp.
Cut it the same day.
Railworks builds railings the way the shop builds them. Tube and flatbar, mitered at the corners, pickets tabbed into the rails. Then it writes a STEP file the tube laser can nest, so nobody has to rebuild the job in SolidWorks first.
SketchUp Pro 2024+ · Windows only · Perpetual license $99
The part nobody else has
SketchUp has never exported STEP.
Not natively. The only other STEP plugin on the market imports; it has never exported. So the railing gets rebuilt in SolidWorks before the shop can touch it, and the detailer does the same job twice.
Railworks recovers the true arcs in the cross-section. That matters more than it sounds. A faceted tube matches no stock anyone sells, so the nester can’t place the cutline and somebody traces it by hand on every piece. Real cylinders, and it finds them itself.
What it looks like on a job
Draw the run
Pick a profile and build along a path. Members follow their centreline, so the run hangs off its line once and the section carries each corner.
Detail it like a fabricator
Tabs and slots, embedded pickets, baseplates, coped ends. The slots are real cut geometry. If they are wrong here, they are wrong on the machine.
Send it to the machine
Export STEP with true arcs in the section. One file per piece, quantities aggregated, and the nester finds the cutline on its own.
“Railworks has just changed the game.”
The suite
Every StepUp CAD tool speaks STEP
Railworks writes it for the shop floor and ImportTools brings it back into SketchUp, so the file that crosses between model and machine is the same one whichever tool is open.
Stop redrawing your own model.
Fourteen days, fully functional, every exporter included. No card. If it doesn’t save you a job’s worth of time, you haven’t lost anything.
SketchUp Pro 2024+ · Windows only