Grading corrupts feature lines

[Cre9engr]

Are others still having problems with the grading objects corrupting their feature lines in 2014 or later versions?  In the past, the grading objects had more bugs than an insectarium that has caused prematured baldness.  

My latest horror story occurred while trying to daylight a sidewalk. I have a sidewalk that wraps around a building, and, because of the issues with Civil 3D grading objects, I graded the site using only feature lines.  After spending a day getting the grades on this sidewalk to comply with ADA standards, including a 2% cross-slope, I was ready to daylight the beast.  Since I had no other options, I used the grading tools.

Things were intially going fine.  The grading objects were projecting to the surface at the desired slope.  The transition I created between two different slopes worked fine.....and then it came time to grade a small spur of a driveway nowhere close to the sidewalk.  When I daylighted this driveway, Civil 3D decided to change the cross-slope of my sidewalk to random grades.  Instead of an ADA compliant uniform 2% cross slope with grades no steeper than 5%, my sidewalk now had a cross-slope that varied from 0.42% to 27%! And I didn't want to even look at the longitudinal grades.  The driveway I was daylighting was nowhere close to the sidewalk, but a small corner did cross the grading object for the sidewalk's daylight slopes.

Luckily, I had a backup file.  The second time around, I decided to explode the sidewalk grading object before I daylighted the driveway.  The second time, it kept my sidewalk grades, but I now have junk feature lines I can't delete.  At least the junk feature lines are not impacting my finish surface, so I can live with the result.

Asop Fable is to always make sure you have a backup file before you use the grading objects in Civil 3D.

Is there anyone else having similiar problems with the grading objects in Civil 3D?  I know they were a problem in the past, but I wonder if others are still having problems?

[Mpendlebury]

You were using diffrent sites correctly ? you know that all objects on within the same site will interfere with each other? 

we still use grading is still very tempramental, it can be fine one minuite and horrid the next.   ts nice for doing corners and things because it will calculate intersections with itself, which corridors wont.

In the case of grade to daylight, i have often found using the offset feature line better.  

Offest the feature line, specify the change in elevation, add it to your sufrace. then use a volume surface to calculate the intersection with the NSL 0m contour and add it as a boundary.  The grade to daylight function can be really slow if your doing large gradings.

[jmayo-EE]

Yes I have still seen issues.

Exploding gradings can lead to more clean up than I prefer to do with overlapping objects and tin errors.

Instead I select the resulting grading feature lines, i.e. the daylight line in this case, right click and copy it to a different site. Then delete the gradings. Use the copied feature lines in the surface.

This is an old workflow that has been posted here a number of times.

[Cre9engr]

Yes. I'm using sites correctly. I treat sites like nothing but large "mason jars" to stuff things (feature lines, gradings, parcels) that I want to interact with each other.  Typically, my drawings have about five or six sites.  In this particular case, because of that small overlap in daylighting, I needed that driveway and sidewalk gradings to interact to calculate that corner.  The thing that boggles my mind is why did the sidewalk 800 feet away from the corner needed to be modified to a cross slope of 27%!?!? The area that Civil 3D changed wasn't near any feature lines, parcels, or gradings located on that site.

I was not aware of copying a feature line created from a grading to a different site method.

[Civil3DReminders_com]

I usually extract the surface from the grading and then delete the gradings. This way I get all of the featurelines that make up the grading intact instead of just the daylight feature line. I won't see the feature lines in the drawing, but are saved in the surface's definition and can be imported into the drawing if necessary. 

Where I need overlap I'll then target the extracted surface to get a clean match line. I've found the way Civil 3D cleans things up between gradings isn't always doing straight projections, but end up with some funky areas where the surface is not triangulating correctly, in my opinion.

[phunter]

I believe I may have stumbled upon the cure for this long standing problem. The way it has happened for me is that either the grading object simply seems to "self-corrupt" or there were a series of iterations where suddenly the offending feature line appears. Regardless of origin, they cannot be deleted....until now. I named the feature lines with distinctive titles and looked for them in the site. I noticed that they would show up without a name or style assigned. Once I assigned a style to one of the offending FLs, the grading object appeared in its entirety. I selected and deleted the grading object and the feature lines deleted automatically.

[vinceroux]

---

@phunter wrote:

I believe I may have stumbled upon the cure for this long standing problem. The way it has happened for me is that either the grading object simply seems to "self-corrupt" or there were a series of iterations where suddenly the offending feature line appears. Regardless of origin, they cannot be deleted....until now. I named the feature lines with distinctive titles and looked for them in the site. I noticed that they would show up without a name or style assigned. Once I assigned a style to one of the offending FLs, the grading object appeared in its entirety. I selected and deleted the grading object and the feature lines deleted automatically.

---

This did not work for me.  My grading objects still randomly corrupt and permanently break my dwg.  I have to revert to the last saved version because even undo does not remove them.  They are undeleteable, unmoveable, unrepairable, and I am unhappy.

[renman83-C3D]

In case anyone is monitoring this post (that by now I'm sure is at the top of some wish list.. i hope to God since we've been talking about this for several years now).... yes in 2018 the grading objects are STILL buggy and unpredictable.  Especially if you go to edit the grading criteria, delete a grading (you better use the delete command in the toolbar! and not select > delete), or grip edit the station of the grading.  I haven't quite identified the cause but i'm pretty sure its related to those actions.  (oh i forgot to mention how random feature lines are left behind or cant be deleted).    

Please Autodesk, please fix the gradings!  Otherwise they're awesome. 

[christopher]

Make sure to submit support cases for issues when you crash, including providing the drawing and the steps to recreate it. It's harder to fix bugs without a data set that causes the crashes.   

[Neilw_05]

In my experience, when you encounter those featurelines from corrupted gradings that can't be deleted, Audit will often correct them. In cases where it won't, close and recover usually fixes them.

[vinceroux]

My post was from 2015 and I still use C3D 2016 at the moment. I am happy to report that in 2016 with the service packs that Audit does in fact remove these broken grading objects. They return, however, and appear to be directly correlated with the shape/size of the grading object that is being generated. Sometimes it's a matter of moving the feature line a little and then the grading object no longer breaks.

I will be upgrading to 2018 shortly and I am afraid of the issue continuing to exist...

[Neilw_05]

I can assure you, 2018 has the same problems.