How to grade a couple of pads?

[travanx]

If I am given a drawing by our main engineer to grade I was wondering what is the best way to do this in Civil 3D.

Right now I am drawing over the Topo in Land 2k6 to make the pad in the correct area and then grade 2:1 or whatever to the next pad and have it daylight where it needs to. As well as doing the correct slopes off the street that was designed. I still havent learned how to do this using the Grading Wizard, so maybe I better learn how to do this in Civil 3D.

So my question is how do I make certain sized pads, grade to each other at a given slope and tie them together. I am the most curious on how to do this and then clicking on the balance volume button to get as close to 0 net cut/fill as possible.

Right now I would like to just practice on some pads and different topos to get a feel for this. I would eventually be using this on 50-300 lot sized projects. But I guess those will be done more by hand until I figure this out.