Grading Optimization in Civil 3D 2022: A Residential Development Success!

SHAWN HERRING: Hello, everyone. Welcome to my session on Grading Optimization in Civil 3D. My name is Shawn Herring. I'm happy to be with you today. For this session, we're going to go over an actual project of mine. This is a residential subdivision, single family lot. And I used Grading Optimization on this in the early stages when GO first came out. So here today to share with you what I did to set the project up and how it worked out.

I'm Shawn Herring, as I said, and this is my 10th year speaking at AU. You can read a little bit more about me there in the handout. We've also got Bryson Anderson here with me, helped me put some of this information together. A couple of housekeeping items here, there is some additional documentation. So there is a step by step handout that kind of walks through everything, the setup of it, preparing your model, some of the settings I use and then running that optimization.

So you'll have this tutorial available for you along with the data sets that I use. And then if you like my class, go ahead and recommend it, share it. The comments here is really helpful. If you comment here, I usually respond. So if you have questions or anything and you want me to address them past the Q&A sessions, this comment in the class page is the best place to do that.

So what is Grading Optimization? If you haven't seen it-- Grading Optimization-- it's available for the AEC collection only. So you just log in, download it. It's a new tab on your Civil 3D ribbon. But what it does, it allows you to put a bunch of constraints on some of your objects. And it goes through iteration after iteration after iteration to meet what you tell it is more important-- whether that's your cut and fill, whether that's amount of earthwork moved, a few settings in there.

Now, once you install that, so I'm going to walk through a little bit of the user interface. We're going to go through a little bit-- five or ten minutes of a PowerPoint before jumping into the software, Just to kind of explain what GO is and some of the things we're going to look for for Grading Optimization. When you do install it, it's found on the Analyze tab of the Civil 3D ribbon. And there's a Grading Optimization panel.

So you can see there that you've got grading objects and a few other things that we'll look at. The interface is built out of four basic parts. Number one, you can see here is the object tool palette. So this is going to be in your palettes, along with say your assemblies and so forth. And this is where we will select Grading Optimization tool. And we'll assign it to some geometry, say a polyline line or a feature line.

The grading objects browser, very similar to your prospector in where when you add something to the browser, it's going to show up there, where you can select it. You can edit it. You can remove it. You've then got the visualization display which has an interface in its own that we'll talk about here in a moment. So as you run that Grading Optimization you can see as it's going through those different iterations and keep track of it as it's going.

And then you've got the Optimization toolbar there at the bottom, some settings that we'll look at once we get into it. Very simple user interface, easy to do. The Object browser-- I'm not going to go through every single one of these. We'll talk about them as we go. But there are several object types that go into that browser, so your low point, your zone, your exclusion zones, ponds, building pads, and all that. So this just gives a little more of an explanation. You can get this in the presentation handout, in the handout document itself.

The visualization display, so once we assign things, once we go to optimize and visualize this in GO, got several parts in here as well. You've got the visualization toolbar. So there's display themes that's available for your surface. You can see it in color. You can see it in wireframe, slopes, elevations, different themes you can do there.

You also have the vertical exaggeration slide bar. So as it is analyzing it, you can adjust that vertical exaggeration. So for flat areas, it's really helpful in seeing what's going on. We've got the legend bar. That just kind of shows you the different ranges of information, so in this case elevation ranges. Optimization status, so as this is running through an optimization, it's going to tell you the total cut, the total fill, the net, and then the max depth, and the minimum depth of cut and fill.

So it's going to be running through some crazy numbers as we go. And then just your coordinates, your x, y, z as well. So a two part thing with the user interface as Grading Optimization as a whole or the user interface with the visualization display. For the Optimization toolbar itself, there are a few things to look at. There's some model settings. You'll see the little, the typical settings icon. That'll open up the preferences and when you can specify certain things in as it's rendering that geometry.

Visualization toolbar that we talked about, that's going to put the toolbar at the top. That's going to let you do themes like your tin, your wire frame, your contours, however you want to visualize your surface as it goes. Convergence plots, once we do an optimization, I'm going to show you the convergence plots. But this will let you actively monitor what's going on. You can see the cut and the fill and several other things there. So it's pretty sick to watch the convergence plot as the optimization is run.

There's some optimization options which you can tell it to weigh your-- it's more important that I have zero cut and fill or it's more important that I have a smooth surface. There are some weights in there that you can adjust. And then once you're done with it, obviously, we want to put this into Civil 3D. So we can send those optimized results back to Civil 3D in the form of a surface, or feature lines, or points.

Typical workflow, you're going to prepare your drawing. You're going to-- so prepare your drawing meaning you probably have an existing ground surface. You probably have maybe a concept plan. It could be detailed concept plan. Or it could be very simple basic concept plan. It would be typically prepare your drawing. We will then assign grading objects to the geometry.

We'll open up the Grading Optimization to find some settings, verify some constraints, and then we'll begin that optimization, visualize it, and return it back. These are hyperlinked in the presentation. So if you want to get a bit more detail on each of those steps, you can access it there.

So how I set this project up-- I started with my surface. So I've got my existing ground surface, my topo. And then I did a 2D concept plan. So this one has curb and gutter, asphalt, sidewalk, some of that stuff in there. So really the two main things you need is that surface and the 2D layout, your concept.

And then I'll build upon that. So we'll use zones for things like the overall project boundary, the outer boundary of the project. We'll also use zones for streets, for subcatchment areas or drainage areas. Those are both going to be polylines in this case. Most of the stuff is polylines, very simple to use the 2D line work.

Exclusion zones-- if you don't want anything graded in that area. So maybe you have a wetland. Maybe you have some back lots that you don't really care how they're graded or you just want it to remain existing. You can set an exclusion zone, so it's not going to take that area into account when running GO.

I've got building pads, in this case, single family development. I have my building envelope where my setbacks would be. We've got drain lines, which are going to be the flow of the curb. Works really well in site plans. Works really well in the subdivision design process as well. Sidewalk transition zones, so I use zones for the sidewalk. You can also use-- there's a sidewalk option that I'll show you. You can also use the sidewalk option.

That's more useful in my opinion in doing a site plan over a subdivision. So I felt that zones would work out really well here. We've got detention ponds, straightforward is a detention pond, polyline as well. And I've identified a low point. So I have an idea where my subdivision should drain to. And I've put a COGO point for the low point.

And if we look at the CAD file again, I've got surface and just 2D line work for the rest of my concept plan. From there, you put in all your polyline lines for what we just explained, with the different areas, building setbacks, pavement areas, and all that. So you go through, you spend some time creating your zones.

Pretty straightforward, but you've got our pond, our building pads, so when we open up the files and look at the data set you'll see the building pads in there. The pavement catchment area-- so I broke them all out into pretty much subcatchment areas throughout the project. Took a few minutes to do that. But those are also polylines.

Flowline to the curb-- the flowline-- and we'll see this when we open up the file-- is the flowline and the zone for the pavement should probably match, and as far as the length and everything. And then we've got a COGO, just a low point there by my pond that represents what I think the low point should be, not elevation wise just location wise.

Then we've got sidewalk catchment areas there. A couple other things-- I did use an exclusion zone just to have it as part of this data set, not grade in that area. And then I have some additional building area. So aside from the pad, how do I want to treat the rest of the lot?

And then I just concluded this little screenshot with a little explanation on what type of CAD object each of these grading objects could be. So a low point could be a COGO point, an AutoCAD point. A zone could be a line, whether it's 2D, or 3D, or feature line, or parcel. So you can go through that and you can see what you can use inside Civil 3D for Grading Optimization.

So that was a quick explanation of how I ran through the process on this project, a little bit of the setup. Now I'm going to jump into Civil 3D and we're just going to do it. So one sec while I switch over to Civil 3D.

OK so I'm now inside Civil 3D. Take a quick look at the interface of Grading Optimization. So I'm going to go to the Analyze tab. Grading Optimization panel is on the far right. I can turn on and off the grading objects. I can turn the grading object browser on and make sure that this grading object tools is on. When that's turned on in our tool palette, you're going to see the grading object tools.

We'll go over this in more detail when we get to the point of assigning them. But this now shows up in our palette. The object browser as well-- so we can see here that the object browser will pop up once we start adding or assigning some GO objects to our geometry. This will populate with more information.

And then when we go to optimize, we just simply select Optimize. That's going to bring up another floating screen, OK? So easy to use interface. This first part really we're going to look at setting up our file and preparing those zones and low points and stuff for Grading Optimization to assign stuff to.

So I've got nothing here but an existing ground surface and my 2D concept plan. A few things you want to do, is you want to create all your zones. You want to pre think this out. Where's my low spot going to be? Just give it some information to go off of. I'm not going to draw all of the zones in there. It's pretty straightforward how to draw a polyline. I'll draw a few of them. And we'll talk about some of the other ones.

But this first part, we're going to prep our file for GO. I'm going to place my low point first. So I'm just going to use a COGO point on that. You can use a COGO point or an AutoCAD point. So I'm going to come here to Points, Miscellaneous. I'm just going to place a point here, somewhere down here in a low spot. I'm just going to call it low point. And hit Enter.

You can have multiple points. You can throw them in a point group if you want. You can have several low points throughout the side if needed. So simple COGO point, doesn't even have an elevation to it. If you want to set an elevation to it, you can set maybe your existing ground or something. Set it from a surface if you want, whatever you want to do.

So we've got our COGO point in there. Second thing I want to draw in there is my pond. So I'm just going to go ahead and draw a polyline. Most of the stuff that I use is going to be a polyline. Maybe I'm at the early stages of a project, and I don't have much design in there, aside from maybe my concept plan. So I'll use a lot of AutoCAD line work. Instead of feature lines, I'll use a polyline.

So something simple, doesn't have to be pretty. If you really want around some edges there, you can. It can be just a rough idea of where the pond should be. In GO we're going to tell it to size the pond. So we'll say, hey pond we need you to be 18,000 cubic yards or cubic feet of storage or something. And create it in this area. Don't use anything past this area, a few settings that we'll do.

So low point is easy. Pond is easy. Nothing special there. The building pads-- so if we were to want these building pads to be certain elevation, we would have to draw those pads in. Again, it could be polyline. It could be anything. I like to use my plat. So if I already have a plat or partials or something that I've put together conceptually, I like to use my plat.

For example, if I come in here-- just going to change to layer 0 real quick. If I come in here and if I offset my parcel, so let's say my sides are 10 feet. I'm just going to do a few of these. And see my sides are 10 feet. This is a street side. So maybe that street side is 30 feet with the front setbacks as well.

And then the rear setbacks, maybe those are also 30 feet. So I like to use the parcels to help outline that. You can then isolate them. I'm going to change layers real quick to say one. And then I use the BO command to get those in there. So a quick way to get that 2D line work in there.

And you'll just copy and paste that stuff over into your conceptual grading, your GO file, whatever you want to call that file. So again I'm not going to do all of these right now. But we'll start populating this file with some of the things we need for GO.

So again building pad in this case, if you have a known elevation this could be a feature line. So maybe you're doing a site plan. You know the elevation of a building or what you want that building to be, you can set that elevation with a feature line. Then when we assign it in Grading Optimization, we can also set that elevation.

We'll do drain lines as well. I'll do those, I'm going to do a pavement area. So I broke out my pavement areas. I'm just going to draw another polyline. I broke out my pavement areas, basically what I would think my drainage is going to be. So I'm just going to sketch that in there. Could add an arc.

So you think of those as catchment areas-- where you want this thing to drain, how you want it to drain. And you'll draw a bunch of those in there. We can do it on both sides of the road. Some of these could be longer. So for example, this entire thing here could be a drainage area, a zone. Just going to sketch that in real quick.

I'm doing that to the flowline of my curb. So we'll also have drain lines in a moment. Those drain lines need to match up with our catchment areas. So roughly draw that in for now, something like that. So you'll spend a little bit of time going through and identifying your drainage areas. Those could be parking lots. In this case, it's going to be my pavement areas. So we would draw a bunch of those. Again, we'd take 20 minutes or so to draw them in on this project.

The drain lines are going to be the same length as our subcatchment areas. So we would have drain lines for this one over here. We would have drain lines for every single one. That's where the water is going to drain to. So think of that as your typical crown, down to your curb and gutter in this case. So you would also put a polyline in, or use your polylines you already drew for your concept plan.

So you would you put that in, draw those real quick. I'm just going to make this quick and hopefully not painful. So I would basically mirror what our subcatchment area is. Obviously I would want to make sure my layer control is probably better than what I'm doing here. But just simple 2D line work that represents those areas for us.

So low point, pond, building pad, drainage line, and sidewalks as well. So we want those sidewalks to slope and drain how our road is. So whatever my pavement drainage area is, I typically like to have my sidewalk area the same. So you'll break out those. And you could use your line work. Or you could use the BO option of boundaries, whatever is the easiest way for you to draw in these things. So whatever your favorite commands are there.

So again we've got sidewalks as a zone. We've got the pavement areas as a zone. We have the drainage line, so the drain line is what GO will call it, low point and our pond. Some other areas in here. So if you want an exclusion zone-- let's say we don't want this area to be graded, we can put in a polyline that's just going to exclude that from any grading.

Maybe in this case we wanted that area to not be graded but our building pad, we can adjust some stuff here. Again it's whatever you feel is best for that project upfront, just to give GO some stuff to go off of and to analyze. Zones are used for a lot of things, so same with the outer boundary.

So I don't want it to exceed my outer boundary. Obviously I want my grading to be within my project. So we'll assign our outer boundary a zone as well. So it'll take an hour or two or however amount of time it takes you on some projects. Site plans go a little bit quicker sometimes. You can just identify parking lots and all that.

By the time we have prepped that file and going to prepare it for assigning objects, it should look something like this. So we've got a lot of areas for our pavement. So I'm just going to isolate those objects real quick. So a lot of individual areas for the pavement, all of our building pads, all of our exclusion zones, my drainage lines. So you can see my drainage lines, and my sidewalk zones match up with my payment zones.

So again I didn't want to spend a whole ton of time in this session talking about how to draw a polyline in AutoCAD. Hopefully, if you're in a GO class or in a Civil 3D class, you've probably got that down pretty good. OK so from here we can now start to assign the grading objects.

So I'm here in this prepped file. It could be the continuance of that beginning file we started with. I'm going to look at my tool palettes now. Here's all of our grading object things that we can assign. And again, the order here that we assign this doesn't really matter. We're going to assign it information. But it doesn't really matter too much.

So I'm going to do a couple of the simple ones first. So I'm just to do a low point. Let me make sure that my object browser turned on. I'm going to come to my tool palette. And I'm just going to grab low point. I'm going to select that. I'm going to select my COGO point and hit Enter.

Creating properties for that low point is going to pop up. There's not a lot to do here as far as a low point goes. Some of these are really simple. You can name it if you want. I'm just going to leave it low point 1. You can see there, nothing too exciting on the properties palette. It is however now added to my grading object browser.

If I select it from the browser, it's going to select that. If I ever have to remove something from the browser, I can select it, right click, and there is remove-- in this case low point. So it'll say remove zone, remove low point, remove pond. And all you've got to do is select remove low point. We'll go ahead and reassign that.

Exclusion zones, so I'm going to come in here. I'm just going to do two of these to be an exclusion zone. I'm going to come to my tool palette, select exclusion zone, and I'm going to select both of those polylines for my exclusion zone and hit Enter. No real properties associated with an exclusion zone. It's just simply says don't grade in here.

My drain lines, I'm going to assign these all at once. So I'm going to select one of my drain lines, right click, select similar, and I'm going to isolate those objects. So these are all my individual drain lines on how I feel this project will drain out. Tool palettes here, drain lines, and I'm just going to window all of them and hit Enter.

OK that's now added in, in this case 19 drain lines. Again, no real properties associated with a drain line. You do tell it, it's a breakline line. You can turn that on or off if it's a breakline line or not. Most likely it will be a breakline line if it's a drain line. I'm going to close that and that object isolation. And now we'll do the overall boundary for the zone.

So I'm going to come in here. When I select zones, so the zones can be anything. So there's more parameters with zones. Some of these other things you'll see that there's going to be a lot of parameters too. I'm going to select my outer boundary and hit Enter. So we can see here that there's more properties here that we need to identify. There are some default settings we can set. I'll talk about that here in a second after we set this one.

But you can see here what type of constraints and you hover over the little information thing. It'll tell you more, goes to help. For this one, we want to do custom slope constraints. I want a maximum slope. And this is anywhere within that. I'm going to do a maximum slope of 33%, so 3 to 1. And then a minimum drain slope of I'm going to say-- let's just keep it at 2% is fine.

We've got a line surface, exclusive drainage, minimum zone inclination or slope, depth of material. So I'm not going to put anything here. But when we do pavement for example in our road, we're going to have a pavement section. Maybe that's 18 inches or something. We want GO to not count for our top grade. We want that to account for our sub grade. So in this case, I'm going to leave it at 0.

Breakline, yes. Grading limit, yes because I don't want anything to grade out of there. Follow grading, global grading objectives, we'll talk about that when we do the optimization. And I want to make sure those are all turned on. So you can see there, just a little bit more settings when it comes to our zones. I'm going to call this one overall boundary. I'm just going to close that out.

So in our tool palette, just like anything with our subassemblies, we can right click on these and go to Properties. So if we want to change these global properties to something more common, we can do that. Or what you can do is you can create your own palette. I like creating my own palette. I think it helps clear some stuff up. Or you can copy and include it on the GO palette as well.

But for example I can right click on Zone, hit Cop. I'm going to right click again, hit Paste. Now I have two zones here. So this one, if I want to change the properties, I can change it to zone-- I'm going to say zone-pavement. That way, when I go to do pavement, I already have some preset settings in here that I can use. And I don't have to change those one at a time as we go.

So I'm going to change a few of the things here. Use global constraints I'm going to change to customize slope constraints, max slope here. So remember, this is our pavement. So I'm going to say I don't want my pavement to be more than 8%. The drainage, maybe I want this to be 0.75%. Depth of material, this is where, again it could take out our finished grade to our road base or sub grade. So I'm just going to do 1.25 feet.

Breaklines, yes. Grading limit I'm going to turn off. Balance cut and fill, minimize earthwork, smooth surface, I'm going to make sure those are turned on. And I'm going hit OK. So that way, when I go to do a zone the next time, I don't have to go and change any settings. I have my zone that's specifically set up on how I want my pavements to be treated. So let's assign this pavement one to our pavement.

I'm going to select one of the catchment areas, just do select similar again, and isolate my objects. And let's assign that real quick. So assign the zone, and window everything. If I needed to change something, I can select one of those. At this point it's one at a time. So you can see there that it took on the properties of my payment zone that we created.

But again I could change that if needed. And now everything still adding to my object browser. So let's do the sidewalk areas now. I'm going to end the object isolation. Let's isolate the sidewalk areas. We've just got a few left to do. Isolated the sidewalk areas. Again, I can make changes here to my tool palette. So maybe I want to Copy, Paste this. And let's just change the properties to our sidewalk.

Maybe these are going to be different parameters. So my max slope is going to be four, my min slope 0.75. I'm going to leave the rest default, depth of material 0.33. The rest should be good to go there. I'm going to hit OK. Sidewalk, just going to apply that to my sidewalks. And let's end the isolation of that.

So two more items that I want to do here, two or three. I also want to do my building pads. So let's select one of my building pads. And again I'm going to isolate those objects. And my building pad, let's look at the parameters for the building pad. Not a whole lot here, elevation we can turn that on. So I can give it a minimum or maximum elevation. I can turn that off.

I can have that level with the grading pad, yes or no. Depth of material, maybe I want to have some crawl space area or something taken out. I'll just say a foot. So it's going to give me a finished grade. But then it's going to calculate cut fill based on a foot. Simple parameters there. Nothing we need to do. I'm going to hit OK.

And let's just assign these building pads. The pond one, I think I'm probably more excited about a pond than anything. I hate sizing ponds, checking volume, resizing ponds, checking volume. It gets quite obnoxious.

So I'm going to come here and select pond. And then I'm going to select my polyline I drew for the pond and hit Enter. And here we have some more properties. So what type of pond is it? Is it a wet pond, is it a dry pond? I'm going to leave it on dry pond. Minimum storage volume, so this is in cubic feet. I'm going to change this to 18,000 cubic feet. Maximum storage depth, I'm going to give it a 5 foot value. It's going to be a 5 foot pond.

Some other things we can do here, allow boundary change. So that's really nice because if it doesn't need this entire area, why use that entire area. So it may shrink or adjust my pond size a little bit. The safety bench-- we can apply a safety bench and it gives you a little dialog box on what that is. So if I expand Berm and expand Safety bench, you can see A, B, C, D, E, F.

Maybe I want a 5 foot berm. Let's do a foot of freeboard. That's pretty common where you have got your storage and then a foot of freeboard, inside slope of 3 to 1. That's fine. I'll leave that. Safety bench depth, safety bench width, and safety bench slope. I'm going to make a couple of quick changes. So I'm going to say 1%, 3%, and 5% on that safety bench slope. OK so again more parameters that were assigning to that pond. Close that.

I've also added some miscellaneous areas. So we've got our building pads. But we also have some areas between the building pads and each other, and then the building pad and my sidewalk and stuff. So I'm going to isolate those real quick. And these are some of the areas that I want some miscellaneous grading done in. I can skip this step if I wanted to. Our results are going to be fine as well. And this just gives me a little bit more constraint that the model has to look at.

So I'm going to choose my zone again. Let's just quickly look at the properties. This here I'm going to do customized slope constraints. I'm going to do 33%, 2%. Exclusive drainage, or I'll turn that on. The rest of that stuff looks fine to me. Is it a breakline? Yep, I'm going to hit OK. Then I'm going to assign that.

And the reason I look at those properties first is obviously I want to make any changes that are global before assigning them. Or I'd have to assign them one at a time, and that object isolation. And so that's about it. So we've drawn the polylines. We've assigned these grading objects. And now we can tell it to perform an optimization. So a little bit of set up ahead of time. You'll see what happens here in a moment when we do the optimization.

So let me switch over to another file that has got everything assigned how I want it. Then I'll go to the Analyze tab. And I'm going to choose Optimize here on the far right. Give that a moment. It's going to ask us to select the existing ground surface. It needs to know that to perform that optimization. And that it's going to launch the Grading Optimization dialog box.

So let's give this a second. This is interactive. So we can move around in there. We can adjust our vertical exaggeration. Yeah, we do have a steep place over there. It's going down to some wetlands. I'm going to bring that down to something else.

OK, so as we talked about we've got our grading objects here that are assigned. We've got the theme along the right and everything in the middle. Some of the settings we can look at. So I'm going to scroll down here along the bottom left. We've got Model settings, so refine the surface. What quality of mesh do you want, low, medium, high. Remove existing ground points, I'm going to say no. Customize max triangle size, I'm just going to leave those off.

So some simple preferences there. This next one here, how do we want it to be shown? We've got our cut fill. We've got any violation, so if it violates what we're doing or we can turn off the results for now. Different themes in here. So elevation, slope, grayscale. Topology, do we want to see the contours? Do we want to see the wire frame or the tin, and then some of our drainage.

So any of that stuff we can turn on. And again Model settings here as far as how we want to see our contours, and what we want to see our slope settings. The convergence plot-- and these are floating windows. So you can move this to another screen. I'm obviously on a laptop here. So that's not going to work for now. But you can't put that on another screen and go about your work. The convergence plot here is pretty slick.

As we perform this analysis coming up, you'll see that the volume of cut and fill, you can see where they converge, all the different iterations, the terrain smoothness, proximity measures, feasibility of it. Convergence plot is pretty powerful information. I'm going to turn that off for now.

And then we have some optimization options. So in this case, we've got some global constraints, our max slope, our min slope. The iterations, so how many iterations do you want this model to run through? Defaults at 100,000, 100,000 could take an hour, four hours, whatever it is, and depending on the size of your project. That's a lot of iterations.

For this one I'm just going to go 2000. That way is going to speed it up a little bit more. The objective weight, so how important is each one of these things to us? So balance of cut and fill, is that the most important? Do we do we have somewhat important? Is it not important? We can change that to whatever we want.

Same thing here, minimize earthwork. Maybe it's a little bit important. But the objective is to balance it. And then smooth surface, is that really important right now? I don't know if it is. I just going to go put it at 50.

And then here, so if our cut and fill is the most important, I can tell it how much cut and fill I want. So if I want it balanced out, I'm going to say 0. So once you've reviewed those settings, once this is looking how you want it to look, the next step is to perform that optimization.

OK so down here at the bottom, I'm going to say Optimize. You can see here in the left side, we've got total cut, total fill, and the net. Those numbers, as soon as this starts going, are going to start changing as we go. It does take just a couple of minutes. This is where you want to turn that convergence plot on.

So I'm going to turn on my convergence plot. Just kind of minimize, give us a little bit more room. It's re-triangulating. It's setting some stuff here. It's looking at all of our settings. It's looking all the objects. And it's about to perform that optimization. And here it goes.

So we've got 2000 iterations of this model that it's going to look at. You can see the numbers here-- total cut, total fill, the net, minimum depths, maximum depths. Again, as it's doing this, I can zoom in here and look at different parts of the model. I can adjust vertical exaggeration.

So you can see here it's continuing to find the best results based on all those parameters it gave us. This one could take a little while. As you're watching this convergence plot, as you're watching these numbers, maybe this number gets close to 0 and you feel it's acceptable, you can stop this at any time.

We're going to let this run for just a minute. Convergence plot is going. You can see here cut fill, net, the amount of iteration. So it's-- I don't know what iteration that's on-- probably close to 50 already. And then again, we can look around and see what's happening. We can see our crown of our road sloping towards the drain line. You can see all this draining out. I liked it.

This is by no means a finished grading surface. I think this is a fantastic way to get some quick grading, especially on site plans. Site plans, it works really well. The subdivision actually worked out really well. We built it off of this. But I use this grading as a guideline to set my profiles. I use the feature lines.

Once we return this to Civil 3D, we'll use the feature lines as building pads. And then we can make some adjustments there. So I think it's a great preliminary grading tool. So as you can see here in the convergence plot, that net value of cut and fill is getting pretty close to 0.

You can see here our net volume is getting closer and closer to 0. It's working its way to that 0. So I'm going to hit Stop here in a moment. We could let it go all the way through. But in just a moment, when I feel good about it, when it gets close to 0 I'm going to hit this stop button. Again we could let it go. But I like where it's at. I'm going to say Stop.

It stopped there, so somewhat close to that 0. At that point if we're good, we can inspect what we have going on here. I'm going to close this convergence plot. But if we like those results, obviously the next step is to send this back into Civil 3D. So in the bottom right of this dialog box here, it says Send Optimized Results. I'm going to go ahead and select that.

OK back in Civil. Closed down GO. We've got one surface. We have 160 feature lines. We have one point. It's going to be our low point. You can create a new surface. Or you can update an existing surface. This new surface, I could say know FG-GO. That way I know it came from Grading Optimization. And maybe-- we'll just choose that style there. And then once I'm ready to push this into Civil 3D, I just hit Finish.

All right and there's our results. I'm going to turn these, I'm going to edit this style real quick. Surface might look a little bit rough. I'm going to turn off my slopes. I don't really care about that. There is our surface. So I'll just select our surface here. There's our surface. There's our feature lines. We've got feature lines all over.

There's our exclusion zones. It did not grade in that exclusion zone. You can see there. We now have our results from Grading Optimization. Again this is where I would throw it into my profile and maybe fine tune that design a little bit more. But this gives us a good idea of what can occur on a site, whether that site is a subdivision such as this, a site plan, a parking lot, and so forth.

So fairly quickly, we can start with our existing ground surface, our 2D line work. We can prep that model just by adding in some more polylines. We can assign it using the Grading Optimization tools. And we can run that Grading Optimization.

So I hope this class is helpful. If you have any questions, you can always go out to the handout. You can comment on the class page. I appreciate your time. And have a great day. Thank you.