now we’re at the moment of truth we’re actually going to create a brand new grading in civil 3D currently I’m in the 06 grading-3 drawing which is located in your tutorials folder which you can find in a link in the description down below so as we’ve been progressing through our process we’ve created feature lines we’ve added elevations to our feature lines and that is going to generate the basis for creating our grading objects so in other words a feature line is used to build off of when you’re creating brand new gradings so we’ll start by generating our grading by going to our home tab then to our create design panel and then we’ve got our grading drop down we’ll click that then select grading creation tools we get our dialog box here first off what we need to do is we need to set a grading group
now just for Simplicity I’m going to go through these dialog boxes and I’m going to name this first grading group ditch drainage
we’re going to select automatic surface creation then for the surface style we’re going to more or less leave that at its defaults everything else will be generated at its defaults however for the volume base surface we’re going to compare this with the existing grade surface so we’ll click ok and now we get our create surface dialog box we’ll leave this at its defaults and just press ok now that we’ve created a grading group you’ll see that when we select this button once again we have a grading group that we can select which is the ditch drainage we’ll click ok and now we need to specify a drainage criteria we do that by clicking on this button currently it’s set to standard set remember in the previous exercises we were creating a criteria set for our ditch well we can select that right here under ditch criteria set select OK and now we have our ditch criteria that we’re going to be using to generate our grading now after I selected that criteria you’ll notice that all of the criteria information is now listed down below if you can’t see this information you can get it by clicking this Arrow if I click it off and click it back on again you can see that all of that information appears once again so let’s go ahead and create our ditch grading make sure that the style is set to ditch and then click on this button right up here to create grading we get our command line that’s asking us to select the feature in other words it’s asking us to select a feature line and we’ll select feature line a b we’ll select this now it’s asking us to select the grading side I’m going to click on this side of the feature line and we do want to apply this to the entire length so I’ll select yes now our command line is asking us to specify a distance right now by default it’s at 10 feet I’m going to go ahead and accept that I’ll press enter and now we’ve just created our first grading we’ll press escape to exit out of the command now we’ve essentially created one side of our proposed ditch and when our command line was asking us to specify a distance remember how it said a distance of 10 feet well it’s getting that prompt of 10 feet from our criteria notice that the distance is listed at 10 feet if I would have locked this distance in I wouldn’t have been prompted with that in my command line now I want to bring your attention to a few different items within a grading object if I zoom in here you’ll see that we have this green diamond that shows up right in the middle of our grading this specifies that this is in fact a grading object if I do a regen all notice that it changes the size of that diamond if I zoom in closer and do a regen all it resizes that diamond so keep that in the back of your mind when you’re dealing with grading objects it’s kind of nice if you zoom out and do a regen all then you can see that diamond once again and now we also have this red line that stretches across our grading as well that’s what’s known as a Target line think of a Target line as being the same as a feature line it’s another Baseline to build off of in order to create another grading object and we’re going to do that right now I’m going to switch my criteria to build a grading to a surface at a four on one slope we’ll change this changes our criteria information and we’re going to select this grading button to create a grading again and now our command line is asking us to select a feature now we’re going to select that red line this red line which is our Target line or think of it again as a feature line and we’re going to apply this to the entire length
and now it’s prompting us for a cut slope of four on one we’ll accept this
we’ll do the same with the fill slope and now we have a brand new grading that stretches across built off from that Target line I’m going to escape out of this command and now we have this Red Diamond that shows up and if I do a regen all it changes the size of this diamond lastly if I zoom out and close all this information down you’ll notice if we go into our surfaces we now have a ditch drainage surface that’s been generated by this entire grading object you can also find this grading object under sites under site one under grading groups we’ll expand this we have our ditch drainage group so these are just some of the ways of being able to create a brand new grading in civil 3D
