Civil 3D Tips, Tricks, and Unnatural Acts: AU 2023 Edition

JERRY BARTELS: Hi, everybody. On behalf of Alan Gilbert, Jeff Bartels, and myself, I would like to welcome you to today's presentation, Civil 3D Tips, Tricks, and Unnatural Acts. Before we get started, just want to touch base on the safe harbor statement. Basically, this is here in case when Jeff Allen and I get together and present, sometimes we have a tendency to get a little excited to say some things that may not necessarily be completely true. So please do not make any buying decisions solely off what you see in the presentation today.

A little bit about us, if you'd like to learn more about us and the things that we do, we operate a blog. It's called Civil Immersion. You can find it at civilimmersion.typepad.com. Going to the blog, we like to post things about the infrastructure space, specifically using Autodesk solutions. There, we share our knowledge and experience and best practices that we've picked up both here at Autodesk and our time in industry. So if you've been there before, welcome back. If you haven't, it's an opportunity to get an experience kind of an AU session at various times throughout the year.

So what's most important right now is this session and what we hope to achieve for you today. That's specifically to help you get the most from your Civil 3D investment. Now we're going to be looking at Civil 3D 2024 as we go through the software or go through our presentations. However, much of what we show may be applicable to other versions of Civil 3D as well. If we're going to be speaking to something that is specific to 2024, we'll make sure and point that out as we go.

All of our presentations, we like to say that we're in the PowerPoint-free zone. We'll only use PowerPoints for the purpose of maybe laying down some foundation of what it is we'll be covering. But for the most part, we like to be live in the application as we go, and that's what we'll be running things today. My name is Jerry Bartels. I'll be going first. I'll then be handing off to my colleague Alan Gilbert, and then he will be handing off to Jeff Bartels, who'll be closing things out for us. So let's go ahead and get started.

I'm going to begin by my portion of the presentation. I'm going to be working on what's called-- I'm calling it Maximizing PSD, or Property Set Data. If you've worked with property set data in the past, property set data can be used in ways that we'll look at today that are extremely powerful when working in Civil 3D.

So a few of these slides to lay down some foundation-- when we're working in Civil 3D, the Civil model itself lives in a DWG file. Now unless it's a very small model-- in most cases, they aren't-- we need to break the model up into multiple pieces or a group of smaller models that hold components that make up the overall model itself. These components could be surfaces, alignments, corridors, and more. And each one of these components will maintain information that Civil 3D knows about, things like length, area, elevation, name, other properties like that. It's also going to contain values maybe that you compute yourself or even custom values that we would add through property set data.

Now it'd be great to think that as we're working, we're only going to have to deal with 7 or 8 files. But as we work on a project and more people get involved and the project gets more complex, the number of files that make up the model continues to grow, connected together through a beautiful latticework of references and data shortcuts.

And as we work on the model, Civil 3D gives us tools that we can go through and begin to analyze different portions of the model. But when we do this, it's basically on a drawing by drawing basis. And this is good, but it's limiting. What we would prefer instead, or what would be even more helpful, is if we could do our analysis on all of the files that make up the overall model.

Doing design review-- now I would only have to check one area. Or if I'm computing quantities, I can pull information from multiple drawings. If I'm reviewing custom values, like maybe I'm doing construction, and I've added embodied carbon numbers or something like that to the different concrete components that make up my roadway, I could review that all of those have been added. I could ensure standards were used throughout design.

And while this is good, what would be even better or best yet would be to look at things as a collection of projects. So example, if this was project A, and I'm doing this for my client El Hefe, Ltd., I may be doing other projects for that client as well-- projects B and project C. And think for a moment how powerful it would be to perform that design review or computing those quantities or reviewing values or ensuring standards across all of the projects together.

All right, now when I first started to look at this, it made my head hurt a little bit because it's like, wow, that is anything like that even possible? And the short answer to that is yes, and actually much more using the Autodesk standardized data tool for Civil 3D.

Now to get started with this, you need to think about-- come to grips with some terms, some nomenclature, if you will, before I start my demo on how this works. First, the view that we're seeing with the magnifying glass is covering all of the files that make up three projects. That is considered a collection. If we look at the files that are part of a specific job, that is going to be considered a job itself. So all of the files that make up project A, those would be referred to as a job.

From here, what we're going to do is I need standardized information across all of the files for me to be able to analyze it. So I'm going to have a job standards file, which is basically a Civil 3D drawing or template that contains nothing more than property set data tables, tables that I can attach to various objects within my model-- alignments, gravity pipes, multiple objects. It doesn't have to be a single object-- could be multiple. This is going to maintain values that are not only computed by the software, but maybe custom values that I've added myself.

So what I can do is with that standard group of property set data, I can then push, using the tool, all of those standard property set data tables out to all of my files so that when I analyze them later, it's a consistent view of the information across all of my data. When it comes time to analyze it, we're going to analyze it in a job data file, which is basically an Excel spreadsheet. It's Excel because we're engineers, and that's just how we like to analyze stuff.

Through the tool, what I'll be able to do is sync all of the data that's been stored in those property set data tables across all of my files into an Excel spreadsheet. I can then review those, make decisions, perform analysis, create a Power BI dashboard, and then I can also make changes to some of the data and push it back to the drawing files automatically-- extremely powerful tool.

So now that we've laid down a little foundation. Let me hop into the application, and we'll take a look at a little bit of how that works. So I'm going to bring up Civil 3D here quickly. And to get started, I'm going to come up to the top. The model files that I'm working with are models A, B, and C. I've got it in a folder-- they're just three files-- contains some civil information. We'll look at the contents in a moment.

But to get started with this process, I'm going to access the Standardized Data Tool up here in the ribbon. Now when I highlight that, you may immediately be thinking, I've never seen that in Civil 3D before. Where do I get something like that? Well, if I come out to my browser here, if you go out to manage.autodesk.com-- basically, log in to your account. You go under all products and services. You look under Civil 3D and View Details. You will see Extensions. And if we scroll down, we'll see the option that I can download and install the Standardized Data Tool. And you'll see that it's good for versions of Civil 3D from 2021 to 2024. Also, while I'm here, Alan will be speaking on the Grading Optimization Tool a little later. That's the same place you'll access the file here. So let me get back to Civil.

Once that's been installed and I have the ribbon, the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a job. Basically, I'm going to group together the files that make up my project model. So I'm going to come in. We'll make a new job. I'm going to call this job AU2023. And the location for the metadata about this project or that this tool will use is going to be stored in a folder of my choice. By default, it's in Documents. I could place it in a shared location. All of that would work fine. It does not impact the location of any of my model files. It instead is going to be the place that's going to maintain the Excel spreadsheet, my standards information, and then maybe some other data about the job itself. We'll say Next.

Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with a template. This is the drawing file that has the raw property set data tables in there that we can work with. So that's fine. Last thing, it's going to build for me the Excel spreadsheet for my job file. We'll say that's good. The last thing that I need to do is I need to tell it what drawings will make up this job.

So I'm going to select the ellipsis here. We'll go to my Civil folder. I'm going to go to Civil Models. That's where they live. I'm going to select that folder. And you see the same files we looked at before. It's not an all or nothing thing. I could click on the plus and start adding those to my job. So we can pick and choose depending on what's in there. I'm going to go ahead and we will grab everything using just standard Windows keys. I'll say Finish and close.

When I click to expand, I see all of the files that are part of my project, the project name's AU2023. I'm going to click on Apply, and it's going to save that information to that folder we looked at. It's going to build the standards file. It's specific now to this project or this job, and it's also going to build the job data file or the Excel spreadsheet that we'll use in a moment.

We'll know that process is done because the icons will change from yellow to green. We'll be ready to go. Essentially, what it's doing in the background, it's also opening those files using the AC Core console, or like the headless version of AutoCAD or Civil 3D. And it is applying a value in there so it knows from the drawing where to go find information about the job. We'll go ahead and close out of that.

Next thing I want to do is I want to open the job standards file. This is the property set data tables that we're going to be able to utilize within our job. So when I open that up, it says we talked about before an empty drawing. Starts with the project name and then a unique identifier. I could come up here and look at property set data information, and I can look and see all of the data that has been created for us automatically.

There are a number of property data formats that have been built. There are also a number of property set definitions or tables that we have. Some we can tie to objects. So for example, if I were to look at tying something to gravity pipe, I could click on this table, and I've now got values that it's going to capture for start point, end point, up station, down station, slope, material, thickness, cover. All types of information is available for us.

I could also do it with AutoCAD objects that I'd like to attach to. I've even got some values here that are kind of-- could be attached to multiple things, like this COBie component. If I'm doing construction, I may want to assign values for installation date or serial number or warranty, start date. The beautiful thing about property set data is it can be applied to anything, and it can maintain any type of information.

I can also create some new tables. Maybe I'll make a new table here called AU2023. Once the table is built, I'm going to tell it that this is going to be applied to just alignments. I could say Select All, but we'll just do it for alignments for right now. I'll define just a single value. I'm going to call it custom. Once again, it could be anything. It could be source information, where it came from. It could be like a [INAUDIBLE] value for quality of the data. It's anything we want it to be. I can control what kind of values in there, or an integer, or real, true/false.

All of that's good. I'm going to say OK. I'm going to go ahead and close out of my standards file, and we'll Save Changes. So now I've got a standards file that maintains information a custom table that I will use with this particular job.

Next thing I need to do is-- remember from my graphic, I took and pushed that standard out to all of the drawing files that were in the job. That I'm going to do through the tool here through Batch Update Standards. I'm going to come down in the list. I can push it out to one or all of the files within the job. We'll do it with all three. I'll say update. It's going to tell me that, hey, that might take a couple minutes to do. That's all right. It's going to be much faster than if I were to try and do it manually. So it's going to push those standards into the models.

And from there, what we're going to need to do next is I'm going to need to associate those tables with objects in the file. So if you think about it-- I'm going to close out of this now-- all three of those files now have a full set of all the tables available in them that can maintain all of those values. They're also set up that they can be attached to multiple object types, but they've not been attached to any objects yet. I could open files individually and add them, but I could also do it globally or through a batch utility.

I'm going to come up here and say Batch Attach Extended Data. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my job. I'm going to select those files that make up the job itself. And I'm going to say Next. And now that it has property set data tables in that file of my standards, I'm going to go ahead and tell it what to automatically attach to. I'd like you to attach to alignments. I'd like you to attach to corridors, pipes, structures, parcels, maybe surface information, and I'm going to say Apply and Close.

All right, so in the background, the system is now using AC Core console or the headless version of AutoCAD. And it's quietly opening and going into each one of the files, looking at all the properties set data, seeing what objects they're applicable to, and it's automatically associating that data with all of those objects. What it is-- it's a way for me to quickly prepopulate all of those objects with the relevant tables.

With that done, let's take a look at some of that data. So I'm going to click on Open. We'll open up model B. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. If we open this guy up and we take a quick look at it, I'm going to select on my alignment here. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go to Properties, and then I'm going to look at Extended Data. When I look at Extended Data, I see now that I have access to all of these tables have been applied to this object. So for example, from a construction standpoint, I could put in an installation date.

You know what, we built a custom table. Let's see if it's here. It is-- AU2023. I'm going to put in a value in that custom one for a two-lane highway. And we'll hit Enter for that. That information is in there. I'm going to scroll down and look a little bit further. There is a table here that is set up for alignments specifically. However, none of the data is populated.

One thing to remember with this tool-- I'm going to close out of Properties. When it's assigning this information using the headless version of Civil 3D or AutoCAD, those values are populated at runtime. So it's not until I open the file and then save it do I get those values filled out for me. So I'm going to go ahead and save this file. We'll see on the bottom-- we see updating sister property definitions. It's updating all of those values. So once that's complete, I'm going to go ahead and select for the alignment here. We'll go back into properties. I'm going to look at our extended data. If I scroll down now, there is my custom value here. And here, we see the information for the alignment has been populated.

Let's take a look at one more object that's in here. I've got a structure. I'm going to look at properties. As I look at properties, if I'm a contractor, I'd maybe like to start filling out some of this information, the COBie data. We'll say that this was installed on 10/23/23. That information is available. I can continue to fill in other values for barcode information, serial number, description, the other stuff down here regarding warranty information and whatnot. I could fill in all of those values. And if I come down here to the bottom, here is all of the data now that's been captured as the fact that it's a structure.

Now if I begin to fill some of that out, once this is in here, it's a process of continuing to populate the rest of the data. I don't want to have to maybe fill that out again for the other structures that were installed on that date or may share those values. So if I go to standardized data tool, there is a other options in here that I can say copy data.

So I'm going to say copy data from this structure that I did. And I'm going to have it populate that information on these couple of other structures here, this one and another one down here. We'll right-click, and if I look at Properties for that, we see that the 10/23 is there, and then the other Civil properties are populated as well.

All right, I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to open up the other two files because just as I mentioned, it was the headless version AC Core console that applied those values and attached them to the objects. So to ensure that they're actually all populated and ready to go, I need to open those files and then save them. Let's go ahead, and we'll say save this guy. Let that save. I'm going to open up A one more time here because I thought I could close that and it would have it, but it was not. We'll close out of C. We'll close out of B, save changes to him. I had A open, but I did not save. I closed it figuring that it would save automatically. It did not. It just went ahead and closed. So let me open that and then save it. Let's go ahead and open model A.

All right, now the main reason I need to be meticulous about this is because I'm doing this in a demonstration standpoint. We've pushed the information out, and now I want to start extracting data. If I was in a real-world environment, like you would be in your office, you wouldn't necessarily have to go through this process because people would be opening files and then updating or adding information as they went and then saving them when they were finished. So it would kind of take care of itself.

I now have models as part of my job that have standardized data tables pushed out to them that have been updated now with values. I'm going to now batch sync that information. I'm going to pull that out to Excel. I'm going to select the files that I would like to sync. I'll say Next. I have two options. I can go from Excel to the model or I can go from the model to Excel. Well, we've not pulled anything out yet, so we'll go from the model to Excel. I'll overwrite all data. I can select particular tables, or even particular values that I would like to sync. But for right now, we'll just go ahead and sync that.

It gave me a warning, as it always does, that hey, this can take some time to accomplish. That's all right because it is certainly much faster than if I was to try and do it manually. So I'm going to let that run for a moment. It is going through and performing that other operation from my graphic now, where it is extracting all of that property set data and bringing it into a single Excel spreadsheet that I can then go through and review.

So I'm going to click here on Open Job Data File. I've got Excel installed on my machine already. I come in and look. Any data that we see-- basically, we're going to have a workbook at the bottom that was automatically created for every property set data table we had. Any column in there that is black and gray at the top, those are populated data within the software. We can't change those. We've got these values here that are maybe white. Those are ones that we can fill in and then ultimately push back.

So let's look at AU2023, our custom table. If I come up here and I expand the column widths, we see that I've got a two-lane highway in model B. I could come to model A, and I could see Second Street. Yeah, that's going to be four-lane highway-- all right, just putting another value. I can start to tweak those numbers.

I can come down and look at the COBie components. When I review that, from more of a construction standpoint, it's not just tied to alignments, but it's tied to multiple objects. So we see there's parcels in here. There's structures. There's tin surfaces. I'm going to come down. Here are the values that I entered on the structures. I'm going to go ahead and put in a value here. Maybe these were installed on 11/27/23.

And let's copy some of these. We'll say copy, drag those down, and paste. I'm going to do one more just so we can change one more value here. I'm going to give it a serial number just for something else to search for. I'll give it something random, something like 8675309. If you know, you know. So I'm going to copy that, bring it down here, paste some of those. So I was able to update some of those values as well.

From here, there are tons of things that I can do with the data. Here's a table that had property set table or data tables that were associated with alignments. I can come in here and see the design speed that was attached to every one in its name-- starting and ending station. I can see whether or not design check set was used.

Design criteria-- I can see superelevation on the end. I can peruse all of these tables. The idea is I have a window into the entire project, looking at all of the data across all of the files. We think about Excel as engineers-- we can do tons of things with that. We can count. We can sort. We can use conditional formatting. I can bring in a Power BI dashboard. There are amazing things we can do with the data, including push it back.

So what I'm going to do is let's save this. I'm going to close out of Excel. I'm going to close out of Batch Sync. And I'm going to say Close. I will come back up and we will sync again. But this time we will sync the opposite direction. So I'm going to select the three files. We'll say Next. This time, we are going to go from the data file, Excel, back to my model-- we'll overwrite all data.

I'll go ahead and say Sync. Says it's going to take perhaps a few minutes to do. Once again, small model, not a lot of files-- doesn't take a lot of time. The system is set up that I could minimize this and continue to work in Civil 3D while it's processing if it was taking a long time. So we can get around that. It doesn't basically prevent us from working.

I'm getting an error message here for every one of the files. The way that it knows how to take the data from the Excel spreadsheet back to the drawing and then to the specific object is through the entity handle. Through my testing with this file, I've attached these same models to multiple jobs over and over again. Somewhere along the line, I think I've damaged one of the entity handles. However, it's not had an impact on my being able to use this, so you should not experience the same error.

Let's go ahead and open up now model B. So I'll go ahead and open up that one file of the many that are in my job. And if I come down here, we'll grab a structure that I did not touch before. I'm going to right-click on that, go to Properties, and if I look at Extended Data, we see that now it has the serial number that I put in as well as the updated installation date.

All right, so going through what we did, I built a job file that contains the drawings that make up my model. I pushed a standards file out to all of those files. We went and attached those standards through a batch utility to the objects. I extracted those objects, made some updates, and I was successfully able to put that back.

All right, so the Autodesk Standardized Data Tool-- very powerful tool, something that it's free. You can download it from the website, and it's something to consider when you're working on your projects. So with that, I am going to turn the floor over to my colleague Alan Gilbert to move to the next step.

ALAN GILBERT: Thank you, Jerry. For my section of the presentation, I'm going to be covering garden-variety grading optimization. In case you're not familiar, grading optimization is one of those extensions for Civil 3D. Jerry just showed another one and how to get there. Grading Optimization was released for the 2022 version cycle, I do believe, and if you're not familiar with the tool, it is a tool that is based on algorithms to help you find the best solution for your grading situation. So it's interactive. You put in some constraints and parameters, and it'll work through iterations to help find a solution.

While it has been released for a few years, it's one of those that we've seen to be a little less understood and underutilized. With that in mind, I wanted to take some time to do a small walkthrough and a tip and trick walkthrough of the more common workflow-- what I call the more common-- mass and rough grading for [INAUDIBLE] and I call the common or garden-variety-- that's where the title comes from.

And the two can assist with much more difficult or advanced grading situations than mass and rough grading, but I feel like this is a great way to start to learn the tool, to ease into it. But just keep in mind that it will do very advanced residential subdivisions and commercial land development and so forth.

So why rough grading or mass grading? We just talked about some reasons, but it's a very common task across multiple industries, whether you're energy, land development, transportation, you name it. It's a great way to compare numbers because we're just looking at surfaces and volumetrics. So I can compare what did I get when I did my traditional techniques to what did the optimizer give me. I've still got to do detailed grading in general after this. So I think that's a great way-- I'm still going to be checking a lot of numbers downstream. So that gives me a little security.

And then, really, the last two are very similar. I think this is a nice, phased approach to ease into the grading optimizer. I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks of this, again, garden-variety workflow to get you started. And then you can take this basics and then move up through the additional objects that you'll see in the list. So with that said, let's get into Civil 3D.

So here we are in Civil 3D, and I currently have a Civil 3D surface object in the file. I have a few COGO points, and I have an alignment, which I will not be using. The great thing about the gradient optimization is that I can really start with any 2D data. I don't even have to have 3D data to begin with. So after the tool is installed, as Jerry mentioned earlier, you're going to go to the Analyze tab. And near the end here, you'll see a ribbon for the Grading Objects and the Optimizer. So these are the two buttons you're going to primarily be in.

I'm going to go to the Grading Objects first. And two things pop up-- so the list of all the different objects that I can create based out of my geometry, as well as a prospector-style browser so that I can manage all of my grading objects in one place here. So today, we're going to be only looking at four of these-- remember, we're going to keep it simple-- four of these particular grading objects. And they're really two teams, in a way. So the grading limit and the zone, which a grading limit is nothing more than a special zone. And we're going to look at the drain line and the low point. And they are very much related, as they control how the drainage flows towards them when you put them in the file.

So we're going to start by creating a little bit of geometry, just some basic 2D information. I'm going to go to the Rectangle command. And I'm going to sketch out roughly my catch point. So this is roughly the edge or catch point of my new grading. And so at this site, this is about a 20-acre site. So again, this is where I'm going to tie to my existing ground surface. Then I'm going to create another rectangle, which illustrates my-- you could call it a pad or my planar surface that I want to control the grading on. So I may do something like here inside. And believe it or not, that's really all we need. We just assign what these are here on the objects and go to the optimizer, so nothing to it.

So I'm going to start with the grading limit. This is the outside edge, or my catch point. Click it, Enter, and we get a Properties button that pops up. A little tip here-- hold your Control button so this doesn't dock. Holding Control down while you drag these around keeps them from docking. Most of you know that, but just a reminder.

So before I put in some slope constraints, I just want to mention the global slope constraints. If I had a ton of zones out and I was doing a lot of advanced grading optimization across a ton of zones and I wanted them all to have the same min and max slope, control, or constraint, I could set this to use global and, when I get to the optimizer, set a constraint for min and max for the whole project.

In this case, I want to control based on the various objects. So I'm going to say Customize here. My minimum drain slope is going to be 0 in this case. That means don't use it. Ignore it. I'm going to come back to what that is in a minute. For my maximum slope, I'm going to set this to 2 to 1 or 50% slope. And what this is going to basically show, because I'm going to have this zone inside, the 50% is going to be between these two or along the edge because I'm going to put a tighter constraint on the planar surface insider grading area. So this is really just my slope or my catch points. I don't need to set anything else, close, and that one is finished.

One little tip and trick here-- if I select this polyline here, this pops back up. So that grading property is now routing with that polyline from now on. If I ever need to remove that, I can left-click to select, right-click, and remove the grading limit properties.

So now we're going to set the next, which is a standard zone. Click on Zone, and we're going to select the polyline and hit Enter. We can name it, of course. We're going to use Customized Slope. And the minimum drain slope here is going to be 0.5%. I'm going to come back to that. That's the coup de gras in just a second. But we're going to set a 10% max slope. So that means, across this plane, I don't want to exceed a 10% maximum slope. Maybe that's the criteria for my solar farm. That's a very common one. But it could vary based on project, of course.

Now what about the min drain slope? So if don't select any low point or drain line or set any other parameters, this minimum drainage slope-- it will try to determine where it should drain by itself, and it will use that minimum 0.5% on this inside shape. And that's just the way it works.

What I want to do is I want to control that, and I want to tell it either a direction or tell it to point towards a drain line or a low point. And that controls the direction of my drainage. So really three ways-- I can set it here with a manual minimum drainage inclination, or I can create drain lines and low points, and it will automatically go towards those.

So let's start with the manual method. I'm going to click the little pencil. You can see 0 degrees is due east. I'm going to move this up and around the 50 degree. And because I'm a geek, I'm going to change that to an even 50. And so our drainage is set to move back this way. One last setting before we move on is aligned surfaces-- very important for us in this case because right now, it's going to do a 10% max slope, but that's overall, and it'll be very bumpy. So I want this to be a flat plane. I want to force it to be. Done.

So that's all we really need before we go to the optimizer. I go back to Analyze and click the Optimize. And that'll take us-- as soon as I click on the existing ground, it asks me that-- it'll take us into that Optimize workspace. Here we go.

So the first thing-- and this is my tip and trick here right off the bat-- is always go to Top View here immediately and turn on direction vectors and zoom in. So immediately, I want to know is the direction-- did I mess up anything on my direction of my drainage? And so you can see that's roughly that 50 degrees that I selected based off of CAD east.

There's a button down here at the bottom. It's called Reset. This is going to be your other friend. So remember this tip and trick. If I go and change some settings over here, staying in this window, Reset will reset and show me what the direction vectors-- how they changed based on what I changed over here. So there's a lot of other theming you can experiment with up here that's really cool.

But over on the side, this is that same Object Browser that we saw back in the Civil 3D standard window. Some things you can do here is I can just get to that Properties. Just like I saw before, it's the same Properties. Or what if I wanted to tell Gradient Optimizer to ignore this zone? So I could click this button here to make it inactive if I would like. So that's what I can do here.

Last setting before we have the fun here and run the optimizer is the button at the bottom called Optimization Options. Remember I talked about those global constraints-- if don't send any of those local constraints and lock down the shapes themselves, and I just want everybody to use these three settings, that's what I can do. The iteration is how many times this will iterate through the algorithm. The default's 100,000. I'm doing 50,000 for this because it's very simple. You can experiment with that.

The last thing that's very important here are the objective weights. So everything we put in so far are constraints-- hard-line rules. This is the last thing the optimizer looks at are these weights. And this is preferences. So I have to decide what's important to me and think about these as percentages. So is balancing the cut and feel to a net zero, as you can see here, is that of high importance? Yes.

Is having a smooth surface between the transition between existing ground and this new grading of high interest to me? Yes, it is. What about minimizing earthwork-- how much cut and feel and keeping the surface as close to where it started to begin with? Not at all, not on this big site. That is lowest priority. So I'm going to set it all the way down to 0 in this example.

So now we're ready to run, so we're going to click the Play button at the bottom. It automatically takes us into a visualization called Violations. And if I click on this little button here to maximize this convergence area, this graph will tell me, am I converging towards the solution as it gets closer to zero? If this stays red or yellow, that's going to mean that I probably need to go back and relax some constraints. I constrained it down or locked it down too much. It also shows me my running net cut field that, remember, I put that as a very desirable thing to have is a net zero cut field. And it is doing its best to accomplish that.

Here at the bottom, you can see the progress and the different stages that it's at. I have no blue or red here. I have no min/max violation shown. So I'm to go ahead and turn off that even while it's running. I'm going to go ahead and spin this up into 3D before it finishes, and I'm going to set the exaggeration slider-- that's what this is on the left-- where I can really see what that slope is doing. So you can see that's tilted back to the north-facing. In those direction, this is a plane surface in that direction that I selected at around 50 degrees.

Now that's complete and we're good to go. If I was happy with this, I can update and send this back to Civil 3D with a new surface. It will be the existing ground combined with this new proposed here. It'll be one big surface. Or I can update an existing one. I'm not going to do that yet because we haven't talked about the other two items.

I'm going to close the optimizer-- doesn't hurt anything. All those properties are still there. And we're going to create a drain line. So the only thing you need to know about a drain line-- it can come from a feature line, a polyline, it doesn't matter. I'm going to do a polyline. The only thing that matters is the direction you draw it because the upstream will be the start and downstream will be the end.

So I'm going to go from upstream, the high point here, and draw that down to the downstream. And we're going to tell it what it. That is a drain line-- I pick the toolbar. Select, Enter-- happy with that. And now we're ready to go back to the optimizer.

So you start having fun with this, and notice, it just remembers my EG, so just right-click. I don't even have to select it this time. All right, remember-- tip and trick. I'm going to set this to Top and turn on my direction vectors. OK, wait a minute, Alan. You told me that my direction would go towards the drain line if it was in the drawing, and it's not doing it. So you're lying to us here.

Not exactly. The constraints are just wrong because that automatic inclination direction I set is overriding and making it ignore this drain line. Remember, I don't have to go back to the product to correct this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say this zone here-- 8. I want to eliminate that manual direction of the drainage. As soon as I make that change, I'm going to hit Escape, and I'm going to hit my fancy Reset button to see if it works, even before I'm optimizing. Now check out my direction vectors.

There's great visuals in the Help document to help you understand how these triangles go and drain towards the drain line and the low points. There are some very distinct rules on how they go about going to the endpoints or the midway perpendicular to the mid-- or along the line. So some great visuals-- especially, it's important if had multiple drain lines because what if I had two here? Well, the closest triangles to that drain line would go to it. The closest ones to this one would go there.