Discover how to create infills for grading objects and further understand grading creation tools using Civil 3D. Learn how to select the correct grading group, target surface, layer controls, and how to set up and use grading criteria sets.
Key Insights
- The grading creation tools window within Civil 3D allows you to set a grading group, select a target surface, and define grading layer controls. These are essential steps in preparing for the grading process.
- The grading criteria set is a crucial part of working with grading objects in Civil 3D. This process involves creating a grading criteria set and selecting it for use, as well as setting up different grading criteria for slope ratios and targeting methods.
- Understanding the different grading methods, including surface elevation, relative elevation, and distance, is key to effective grading in Civil 3D. The software provides options for conflict resolution, such as using an average slope or holding a slope as a minimum or maximum, which can be used iteratively for best results.
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Okay, so now that we've created the infills for our grading objects, we're ready to go start working with our actual grading creation tools. We're going to go up to the home tab of the ribbon bar, we're going to drop down our grading drop down window here, we're going to go to our grading creation tools.
So before we get into grading creation tools, I'm going to talk about the first portion of the grading creation tools window. The first couple buttons we have here are setting the grading group. So the grading group that we created for our dev main site, our dev main grad grading group, this is how you would set it to make sure you're working in the correct grading group.
If you needed to move to a different site to work on a different grading group, you can select the site from this first drop down and then select the group name from this drop down. So moving on from here, we have a button for selecting our target surface. So what you're going to go ahead and do here is you're going to click this button, Civil 3D is going to open a window where we're going to be selecting the surface that we want to potentially target with some of our grading groups.
You don't always necessarily target a surface as part of a grading group, but there is an option to target a surface and so this is the surface that we'll be targeting when we do a grading group. So for our purposes, we want to go ahead and use Civ 203. I'm going to go ahead and set it to Civ 203 and click okay.
Moving on from here, you have the layer controls, so setting the grading layers. If you select that button, you have the option to select the layer that your grading objects are going to be on. I'm okay with it being on C Topo Grad, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it as is.
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If you wanted to change the layer, you would go ahead and select this button here to change the layer that you want to have your grading on. Moving from there, we have this idea of a grading criteria set and that's what we're going to be spending our time in in this video is creating ourselves a grading criteria set. From here, you can select this button and then select the grading criteria set that you're going to be working in, and then the grading criteria set that you select will populate the grading criteria inside of this drop down.
So in order to work with a grading criteria set, we could select this button here and then select the one we have, but we don't have one that we've created. We could work with the basic set, but I want to go ahead and walk through creating each of these individual criterias. So I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel.
I'm going to close out my grading creation tools and then I'm going to navigate to settings. I'm going to go to grading. I'm going to go to grading criteria sets.
I'm going to select grading criteria sets. I'm going to right click and I'm going to select new. So inside of this new grading criteria set, we're basically setting up a folder where all of our different grading criteria are going to be inside of.
I'm going to go ahead and change this to our dev grad because we can use these criteria sets for both our dev main grading or our dev branch grading. If you went back and did our advanced grading for our dev branch lots. We're going to go ahead and call this dev grad.
I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. Now we've got our dev grad grading criteria sets. We're going to go ahead and right click on dev grad, select new to add in a new criteria set.
So inside of these criteria sets, you're going to notice in the information tab, we have the options for what is the name of this criteria set. It's kind of important to know what criteria we're dealing with before we can set a name for it. So let's go ahead and go to the criteria tab.
Inside of the criteria tab, we have our grading methods. We're going to go through one of the methods for this video. And then in the future videos, we'll go through the rest of them.
We're going to go ahead and drop down here. And what you're going to see is you have options for surface elevation, relative elevation, and distance. So I'm going to go ahead and go with the first one, which is surface.
Now that we know we're going to be dealing with a surface grading criteria, I can go ahead and change this. Now you can set up different grading criteria for slope ratios and setting multiple ones for the same type of target method or grading method. I find it easier to just manipulate the remainder of the information below as we're creating the grading groups.
So more often than not, I create grading criteria sets that are just for grading criteria, basically hitting the main targeting options. We're going to be working with surface. I'm going to go ahead and go to information.
I'm going to go ahead and call this surface so that we know we're working with a surface grading criteria. So from here, we have our target, which is surface. We have the options for how we're going to project.
We can do cut and fill slope, cut slope only, or fill slope only. I generally like to work with cut and fill slope so that Civil 3D does them all in the same action. I'm going to go ahead and go with a search order.
You have the option for searching for all of your cut slopes first and then your fill slopes, or searching for all your fill slopes and then your cut slopes. Sometimes you can have issues with grading building properly inside Civil 3D, and a lot of times that'll be an issue related to cut or fill first. If you're having problems doing a grading operation inside of Civil 3D, then the first thing you're going to want to check if you're targeting a surface is your search order.
So I'm going to go ahead and just arbitrarily choose cut first. We can manipulate these options on the fly when we're creating our grading groups later, or our grading objects later. So I'm going to go ahead and move on to our cut slope projection up, and then our fill slope projection down.
We're cutting, so that means we're going from the feature line up to the surface. So our format can be slope or grade, and here's where we can confirm what slope or grade is. Slope is a ratio 2 to 1, grade is a percent.
50 percent is the same as 2 to 1. I generally prefer to work in ratios when I'm dealing with grading groups, so I'm going to go ahead and go with slope, and I'm going to go ahead and change my cut slopes to 1.5 to 1, because I work in San Diego, and San Diego's maximum slope ratio is 1.5 to 1 on a cut. So I'm going to go ahead and leave it as this, and then we can choose to lay it back further if we want to as we're creating these grading objects. So I just know that I will never be steeper than a 1.5 to 1 slope.
So moving on from here, fill slope, I'm going to go ahead and go with format. I'm going to leave it as slope, because like I said before, I like to work in ratios, and I know that I'm never going to get steeper on a fill slope than 2 to 1, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it as 2 to 1, and then like I said before, we can manipulate these on the fly as we're creating our grading groups or our grading objects. So from there, you have the options for conflict resolution, which is your interior corner overlaps.
So on an interior corner of a grading object, how do you want to resolve conflicts? We have the options for use average slope, hold slope as a minimum, or hold slope as a maximum. I generally choose average slope, and then if something doesn't look right, I'll come back. If I need to, I'll delete out the grading that I created and then switch up my conflict resolution and see which one works best.
So these are kind of, to me, I use grading criteria as kind of an iterative approach. If I create it and it looks good and I'm comfortable with it, I leave it. If it doesn't quite resolve the way I expect it to, I go ahead and delete it out, change some information on the fly, and then save it off if it looks the way that I expect it to.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit apply, hit okay, and so now our DevGrad inside of our grading criteria sets shows up with an expansion button here. We can drop it down, expand it out, and we now see Surface. Now you'll notice that we already had a grading criteria set here, and you'll notice that it says grade to distance, grade to elevation, grade to relative elevation, grade to Surface.
We could have gone ahead and used this basic set, but I do want to walk through each of these individual targeting methods so that we can understand what we're doing when we're creating these grading objects. Now that we've created the first criteria set, I'm going to go ahead and save my drawing. This time, since we're starting to get into our advanced grading, I'm going to go ahead and do a file save as.
So I'm going to drop down a file. I'm going to select save as. I'm going to make sure I'm in the working folder.
I'm going to go ahead and add ADV for advanced in front of my grad for here. So I have civ203 advancedgrading.dwg. I'm going to go ahead and click save, and then I'll meet you in the next video.
