In this exercise we’re going to be getting into balancing cut and fill volumes currently I’m in the 08 grading Dash 5 drawing which is located in your tutorials folder which you can find in a link to the exercise files Down Below in the description now we’ve been discussing editing gradings and we have this building pad that we’ve been dealing with if I select this say white line this is our feature line which our grading object is built off of and we have different grading styles the green represents the fill and the red represents the cut within our grading object now I’d like to dive into some of the grading tools that we have at our disposal to be able to analyze some of our grading if I go up to the analyze tab and then select grading volume tools I get the grading volume tools toolbar if you hit this button you can toggle this additional information I’m going to leave this open and I want to make sure that I’m on the right grading group if I select this button I can choose which grading group I’d like to analyze currently we only have the building pad I’m going to choose that then click OK and you can see that the group that’s going to be analyzed is down here below I’m going to adjust this box just so that we can see our grading let’s take a look at some of this information down below we have a cut which is the red area that’s shown here the fill which is the green area is shown here and the net cut or fill volume is listed right here now the net is the difference between the cut and the fill so if you have more cut within your grading group it’s going to show a net of cut if you have more fill within your grading group then the fill is going to show up in your net so next if we’d like to adjust or raise or lower our grading we can go and click one of these buttons if we want to raise the grading group we can select this button and this is our increment currently it’s set to one foot increments I’m going to raise this grading Group by one foot and you can see how it affects our cut and fill volumes next I’m going to lower this one foot and it brings us back to our original numbers I can lower this again by one foot if I’d like and you can see how our numbers are being impacted there is a way to be able to automatically adjust your cut and fill volumes to get them as close to zero as possible you do that by clicking this button which Auto balances the volumes typically the required volume we’d like to keep this as close to zero as possible I’m going to select ok
and you can see we have a net cut of only 38 cubic yards so these are just some of the ways of being able to use grading tools to be able to raise your grading or lower your grading or automatically balance your grading within civil 3D
