The Handy Man's Guide To: Grading Optimization in Your Civil 3D Toolbox

CRAIG DIEZIGER: Welcome to the handyman's guide to grading optimization in your Civil 3D toolbox. I'm Craig Dieziger. I'm a senior CAD designer with Morrison-Maierle. In this session, we're going to cover the new Civil 3D software grading optimization with Civil 3D 2022. We're going to cover the following learning objectives. Discovering the components of grading optimization program, how to create a design service integrating optimization program, how to successfully use a grading optimization program in your workflow. And learn how to apply generative design parameters to use within the grading optimization program.

Grading optimization, I'll refer to it as GO so I don't have to spit out the mouthful. GO for Civil 3D works with what's called optimization constraints, optimization objectives, and grading optimization grading objects. All three of these will be covered. The constraints or your limit, slopes, grades, and/or elevations. So surface restrictions. The objectives are feasibility, cost feasibilities, the surface, cut fail balancing, smoothness of the contours and total earthwork. And then grading optimization grading objects are the features that we'll use to apply the constraints and objectives. We'll be working through the following workflow. 2D site layout in Civil 3D as your basic AutoCAD function. So I'm going to assume that you already know how to lay out a site.

Plan site grading constraints and objectives. So taking that site plan in and figuring out what constraints and objectives to apply to it. Applying grading optimization grading objects to things like catch and polylines. And then sending it to GO from Civil 3D. And then running the optimization to generate a designed surface in GO and then sending that optimized design surface from GO back to Civil 3D.

And with our time constraint, I'm going to jump right into Civil 3D. This is the site will be working with. It's a small business. It's got landscaping, some parking, the building, some drainage up front that we'll need to take in consideration. And so your basic type development site. When working with GO, what I like to do is work with polylines and hatch patterns. Just everything's 2D. And the reason I like to work with hatch is it's an easy thing to see what areas I'm covering versus selecting the polyline, where it's not as clear. If I didn't have that hatch on, you would see that it's a boundary, but you can use either one to define things.

So GO, in Civil 3D, you apply the grading objects. And those can be found on the analyze tab here under the grading optimization panel. And then grading object tools are right here. So this button right there. And there's also a grading object browser where you can see which objects are currently in the drawing. Currently I don't have any of those grading objects defined within this drawing. So all I have is the polylines and hatch patterns and a few AutoCAD points, not COGO points but just plain AutoCAD points.

You can toggle these two on and off just by selecting grading objects or individual button. So the first thing you want to do when you're looking at how to lay out grading objects and their constraints for this kind of divide things up into areas of similar criteria. So you're looking for things like what slope, min slope, max slope, are they going to be drainage or are they going to be asphalt, is it going to be concrete for sidewalks or building pad? Kind of try to match it up to the grading objects that are provided. Things like zones can be used for landscapes. And many of things like that where you give it a min, max slope or a grade that that area can have.

You really are not defining any elevations except with a bound point where you put in a fixed elevation. The rest you're giving it a min, max or a low point or just telling it what the criteria is, not giving it an elevation. It will figure that out based on the surface that you tell it to start with. And in this drawing I have one surface. I've just got it set to where it's not showing right now, but it's an existing ground surface based on a survey for this site The first thing you want to do when defining, starting to apply your grading objects to your drawing, is apply one to the grading extents.

And this is kind of like a temporary extent. Because you really don't know where you're grading will end and where it'll begin. But in this case, I'm going to just use the boundary of the property. So I'm going to apply a grading limit to this hatch. You find grading limits on the tool palette. Select it and tell it what you want for the min, max slope. By selecting the grading limits, all this really is a zone. But it's already predefined for customized constraints and whether to align the surface for certain things, whether it's going to be exclusive drainage min zone inclination, things like that. Material depth. So it's already set to be defined as a grading limit so that it knows. So we're going to go ahead and tell it that. And we're going to go with instead of a 33%, we want to have a 40%, which is a 2.5. And then 1%. And we're not worried about the depth because this is just basically going to cover the areas that I don't give it any constraints to work with.

And once I have those set the way I want it, I can just hit escape and close that. Now I want to do the building pad next. Let's do the building pad next. Isolate it. And building pad is also already predefined here in the tool palette. And just select it, select the hatch. And here it already has a name. You can give it a fixed elevation if you want, or a min, max elevation. If you want it to be a fixed elevation, you give the min and the max the same elevation. In this case, we want GO determine what that building pad elevation is going to be. So I'm going to tell it off. And I'm just telling it I want that pad to be level. And there's about a foot and a half of material that it's going to need to cut out for the cut and fill.

Once I have that, I have a building pad selected. And if you look over here at the grading object browser, you'll see that it's starting to populate. So here's the GO building pad hatch number one, so that's one we just defined. If I select it, the properties pop up. I can right click on that and zoom and that'll take me to it. And then the same thing with your grading limits. Select it, property comes up. The order you put things in is important because there is a priority, especially with zones, on how things will react. The last zone in controls the constraints that are applied to that area. So that building tab is over the grading limits. So it's going to control over the grading limits in that area. Same thing when I select landscape.

I can select all those. Come up here to zone this time, because there isn't a landscape one. Now, one thing I could do is copy the zone, paste it onto the tool palette and then rename it to landscape. And then set the things that I want to use every time. So if the landscape you do is similar every time, you can set those constraints here. So customize and in this case, I want it to be 40 and 1. So I have a landscape here now that I can select and apply and it already has the default settings for me. So you can save your municipality standards, things like that, your typicals on a tool palette so that you're not having to remember what to do with them each time.

So just one more way to save a little time. And now if you look under zone, you're going to see all of those we put in there. If I want to see where that one is, select it, zoom to, and there it is. It's that little l-shaped landscape. The other types are pavement and sidewalk. So let's go ahead and do sidewalk first. So now I have sidewalks selected here. There's already one here for that, I'm going to go ahead and select sidewalk. And I want that to be 0% minimum, 2% max minimum zone inclination. What that is that allows you to set an angle in which you want that object to drain.

And so maybe if it's really important to you, say this area you want to make sure it drains this way rather than the direction I just gave it or this you want it to drain this way, then you'd need to do each of these in individual hatches and set an inclination for each of them. You also can set the depth and material for it. So we're going to set that 0.75. And that sets each of those. And now if I look under zones, because that's all the sidewalk is a zone, it's added those three areas of hatch. So there's one. And there's the settings of two and then three.

And then there's the pavement area. You'll notice that it goes under or right up to the curb. So it shares the same line as the curb, it needs to know what to do there. We're going to tell it to do a paved section or a parking lot. And is it still a zone. And we want to leave that at 5 to 1, and let's say 2.5 foot depth. Here again we could set the minimum inclination if we wanted to drain this direction. And you get that nice little glyph that helps you pick the angle. And if you wanted this to drain this way, you would break this into a separate hatch or separate enclosed boundary.

And then you also have accessible paths or 88 paths. I'm going to select that, assign an accessible path. We know it's in the pavement, so I want that to be 2.5 feet. And then I wanted to meet ADA regulations. So I'm going to say 0 to 2% max slope. So no area within that should be over 2% even though it's in the paved area that we just said could have a max of 5%.

Then you have what's called a curb. So if you select the curb line, which is this cyan color, and select curb, you have a couple of different settings here that you can set. Now, you're not able to-- if you have integral coder or catch curb filter, any of that-- you're not able to set all those. But you're essentially giving it a width and a height. So the width is here. We're going to tell 2 feet. And the height we're going to say is .5 feet in this case. So from the low end it's going to be half a foot to the top. The direction you draw the curb matters. So the display of the thicker line will show you the back of the curb. And so you want to make sure if I draw it the other way, the wrong way, then I'd need to flip it so that it shows correctly.

Now, that's something you can switch in GO once we get there too and it'll bring back to Civil 3D. But you want to pay attention to that. The next object that we want to work with is what's called the drain line. So a drain line, think of that is your [? total ?] slopes, so the low brake lines, the valley brake lines. So I'm going to isolate them. So I have all these, I'll just select them, select a drain line. Notice there's really not much to do here other than say name and a break line and the color. But I've already told them now that they're drain lines. A bounded point is something that you give an elevation to. So we have one right here. And what that is we have an existing star grain inlet right here that has a pike that comes out and daylights here into the ditch. So we don't want to have to raise that pipe, so we want to make sure to set the actual elevation on that by giving it a bounded point. So I'm telling it I want to fix elevation. If I turn fixed elevation off, I can give it a min, max so it will flow. But I want it to be at that defined elevation.

I actually had that point at that elevation. So I create it. So it's there. And then you have low points. So this is a low point, this is a low point. There's a low point right here, here. So every place I want that ditch to flow to, so I'm telling the drain line here. And then there's a low point. Drain line, low point. Drain line, low point, OK? And then these are two existing inlets that we can adjust the rim on. So we just want them to be low points. And all we're saying is within that area we want that to be the low point within that area. So it's going to divide this area up and bring it into these two. And it'll just make it to where everything is pretty much flowing around this pond that we'll define, and then into this. And no elevation given. So you just keep defining each of these grading objects and doing your best to define things.

Keep in mind, you don't have to be perfect the first time. Bring something into GO and then see how it works. And if you have to, come back, adjust it in here and then send it back to GO. It may take a couple of times. And it takes you a few times of assigning these to kind of get the gist of planning and things like that. So for instance, here we have an entrance. Well, we have that pipe going underneath it. I need to make sure I have two feet of cover or 18 inches of cover over that pipe. So I'm putting what's called the bend line right here, and that's your crest break line. So the top of the slope. So this is going to be a high point within it. And I'm telling it to be a break line. So now there's a bend line there. So if I select it, there's the properties again.

And then there's what's called the elevation offset. So I have a line here that says from here to here, I know I need to be at least 3 feet deep because I have a 12 inch pipe coming out here and I want to make sure I have enough cover. So I'm going to put an elevation offset on that polyline. And the direction matters in which direction you draw. So if you drop from left to right, this would be your high end, this will be your bottom end. And that's the way I drew that. And I'm just going to tell it 3 feet. OK, so fixed elevation offset at three feet. So it will start three feet lower here. So actually it's going to grab that bounded point and come up and make this three feet.

So I could do the same thing here. One of the new features with 2022.1, this wasn't available in 2022, but that is a retaining wall. Select a retaining wall, it works similar to a curve where you have max, min height. And the thicker is the low end. And then you can reverse it. So the direction you draw it. I know this is in the right direction I want it to be here. I'm putting this in as a retaining wall or a pipe wall. And I want it to be between 3 and 2 feet high. And that's pretty much all of the different types of objects you can apply. There's an exclusion zone. If you put an exclusion zone in, it won't do any grading within that area. We can define this pond. Not necessarily the best place for pond, but it will work for this exercise.

You have an option between a dry pond or a wet pond. If you select wet pond you get a few more options that you have to define. We want it to be a dry pond, something that things just work into. You can set the min, max storage. Whether to allow it to change the boundary that you have drawn. And then if you want a safety bench, and I'd say, no, I don't want a safety bench. And then a berm. If you don't want to berm, set it to zero. Freeboard you can set to zero if all you're worried about is the storage volume. And then what you want those inside slopes to be. From there, once you have everything set, you're going to go ahead and push optimize and that'll send it GO. Because of time, I didn't go through setting every little thing. I've got a drawing that I'm going to jump forward to. Before doing that, keep in mind that you can stack these.

There's a grading object called the lined edge that helps keep things smooth and more consistent than just a drain line. A drain line is just going to make sure it flows from point A to point B. It may kind of do a little roller coaster look, even though it's got a positive drain. A lined edge is going to help fix that elevation. So I've stacked a line edge on top of my drain lines in this area because I need it to be more consistent. So I'm going to go ahead and jump to this drawing where everything is defined in here. So if I look at my constraints, everything is set.

So from here, you want to select optimize. You'll see it says it's launching GO. You get into GO, you're going to find that everything is there. You can see the elevation offset's got a little arrow by it showing which direction. There's an arrow for the drain line showing that it's going in the right direction. You have your browser for your grading objects and everything there. And then you can control within GO how things look. So you have the grading option, object browser, the workspace, and then the optimization toolbar. As we start to optimize-- I'll go through this more in depth-- but you have the ability in here to highlight. So there's the building pad. So same functionality as within Civil 3D, but if you look at the zones, if they're not in the right area-- so top to bottom is your priority-- so if I want accessible paths to be in control, I need it to be above pavement. So I can move them just by dragging and dropping in the direction I want them to be.

You can make those changes here, too. So say you want to see what a 3% min slope for the accessible paths would be or max slope would be, if that would help. So you can change it here and that will eventually go back to Civil 3D. So once you are good with the zone prioritization, all you have to do is simply hit optimize. It'll give you a warning initially that something might be wrong. But as you're working with it, down here on the optimization toolbar you're going to find that there's a convergence plot that shows you the proximity measurements. So this is an iteration. So I've got it set to 100,000 iterations. If I let it run, it's going to continue to come down here and you want it to eventually flatten out. And that tells you it's probably about as best it's going to be. So if you don't want to wait for 100,000 iterations, you can stop it any time and then move on.

It shows you the cut and fill volumes here and then what it's doing for the terrain smoothness. So that's your convergence plot. And then you also can control how it looks. You have cut and fill. Which if I turn off a few things here you'll be able to start seeing the red and the green come through where the cut and fill is. I'm going to turn things back on. OK. And then if you want to see how it's working, this is showing you violation. So max slope violation is the darker red. Min drain slopage that medium red, and then the light red is both. So really what you're looking for is those to start minimizing. Keep in mind, GO is a great tool, but it's not going to be perfect when it comes back to you in Civil 3D. You still got to do some thinking and some work and some refining once you get it back in. What it's doing is getting you to a point that takes time to get to in Civil 3D. It's about 80% to 90% I feel where you need to be.

For this example, I did this site with feature lines, it took three to four days to go through a bunch of iterations trying to get that perfect mixture because it's so flat and good drainage. It came within a tenth of my finish floor that I figured out with feature lines and going through all those iterations. But you can see, I'm getting there a whole lot quicker. So this will turn off the themes and set you back. And then here you can set different ways of displaying it to view. So you have the gray scale, you can set a rainbow of things based on slope down here. The topology, whether you want to see contours or wireframe. I like the contours. And you have the hydrology that will show you the arrows. So this is the direction it's intended to drain with the constraints that you've given it.

The whole time it's been optimizing. So you can see, we can spin around, we can hover over these here. And it'll tell you what the error is. So you can see that max slope I'm within 1/500th, I'm not too worried about that. This min slope here. You know, I'm almost a percent, I'm real close to the min that I want. So everything's looking pretty good. You can see it starting to narrow out and flatten out. And the cut and fill is looking pretty balanced. So you can see right now I'm looking at an excess of about 2,500 yards. So looking pretty good. Once you're pretty comfortable with it, I'd probably go a little further normally, where this is flattened out quite a bit more or for a little longer. But for the sake of time, we're going to go ahead and stop.

And that's it. You can see it. It stopped doing the optimization. Before I take it back to Civil 3D, I can exaggerate that elevation and look a little bit at things just to see, does it make sense? Do things look right? Kind of look around. I think it's looking good. I could make a change and start optimizing again if I wanted. I can hit reset and that'll take it back to the condition it was before I started optimization. So you still have a lot of flexibility in here. Once I'm satisfied with it, you just hit send optimized results back.

From here you can set how do you want to handle this. So if I already had an optimized surface in here, I'd be able to update that existing surface. So it'll essentially overwrite the existing optimized surface that I had in here. Or I can create a new surface each time and give it a name. And I'm just going to call it GOFG. And then give it a style. I'm going to show it at 0.5 minors and one foot majors. I can tell it that I want it to bring in the feature lines that it created, so things for grade breaks and things like that. If I don't want to, you just select it off. There's 36 of them, I'm going to go ahead and bring it in. I can say put it in a new site or update an existing site. I'm going to say new site. And then what style I want those to be in. I'm just going to leave it at my company standard there.

And then what to do with those points. Do I want to create a new point group? Or obtain an existing? And then what style I want them. Keep in mind if you send us to GO again and come back and you bring in the feature lines and the points, it's not going to overwrite those points and feature lines. So you'll end up with duplicate. So you'll want to make sure if you're doing it a second time, to put things in a different site and point group so that you can easily erase the old ones. Hit finish. And that will bring in a surface. You'll see that it looks like it brought in the old one with changes here. Well, essentially that's what it did. But it's matching at that grading level.

So if I isolate the grading limits-- this is what I like to do anyhow-- is isolate it, select that surface that it brought in, and just apply a boundary to it. An outer boundary. And that way all I have is the surface within that was changed. I think things look pretty good. It looks like it would drain. You can see there's a retaining wall there. Everything from there. Also you have those feature lines that are brought in. So say this isn't what you wanted to do within the grading of the landscape, you can start with these feature lines and meld it to the way you want it to be and refine it more. Or just modify the feature lines and add them to the surface and rebuild the surface with break lines and the points that it brought in. So it's getting you to a more complete point with your grading and helping you determine where to go from there.

And that is my presentation. I hope that you enjoyed it and that it's showing you what you wanted to see. Showing you that grading optimization with this new tool for Civil 3D is a great tool. And it's going to get you to a point along the path of grading a lot quicker and save you a lot of time. So thank you for attending. I want to give special thanks to Charlie Ogden and Chris Hinkley for their help in proofing and helping me along with this presentation. And I said thank you for coming and hope to see you again.