2% SWALES WITH AREA DRAINS

[crive008]

Hi, I am grading a planned community. I have about 50 lots to grade with 2% swales draining into area drains and 5%grades away from the house up to 10 feet max.  Has anyone experimented with surface labels and feature lines to do this sort fo thing?  Is there an efficient method using surface labels that can cut down the amount of time per lot?  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Joe-Bouza]

Yes. I would imagine a good set of FL would speed that task up.

Alignment and profiles >> FL could be usefull too

projection gradings, etc

[Grimes_MG]

I've found that grading objects are extremely buggy and I no longer rely on them to be there the next time I open a drawing. I add the featureline the grading object creates to my surface as a breakline. That way, if the grading object blows up, I still have the feature line, breakline, surface TIN and countours.

If you create your bulding pads as featurelines and then create a generic set of featurelines representing the minimum grading scheme you need you can then copy and paste the grading scheme to each building pad. The grading scheme (featurelines) will snap to the building pad's featureline elevation and update all the labels accordingly. You can the do some individual lot grading at the limits of your grading scheme to match TOC, retaining wall, swales, etc specific to each lot.

I worked on 500 lot subdivisions and this is one tool we used to decrease production time. Keep in mind, the engineer will need to review each lot individually- looking at the labels and making sure they make sense with the overall grading plan, adjacent road(s), water bodies, etc.

[Joe-Bouza]

Yeah. I've been hearing that for years now. Project to create, move from site to memorialize, add infills they are more stable then they are given credit for.

Personally I hate having a surface definiton with ooodle and oodels of FL, flipped faces, deleted lines, yaddaya.

I prefer to put the feature lines in site infill grade and move along. Surface def read "Grading object" and the plan is live, and you can still do what you suggest.