Idea for grading typical subdivision or general site grading. (unstructured?)
Feature lines work well but can be time consuming to detail, keep track of, revise and finalize the finer details. Works great on wholesale grading but can be a struggle when working on finer details.
How about taking some ideas from corridors (subassemblies) which work and integrate so well?
example - typical toolset of "snap-ins":
- Driveway Apron/Curb Cut snap in
- Sidewalk snap in (non-alignment based-freeform)
- Driveway snap in
- Parking pad snap in
- Building pad snap in
- Retaining wall snap in
- more?
The idea being that these have features like a subassembly (width, thickness, daylight, slope, connection points, etc.).
- Many times, grading for driveways, building pads and such are constrained by the lot. However, you may have to grade the soft areas across multiple lots rather than within a single lot. Isolating the usual single lot hardscape features can help.
- Drag and drop to snap together and change design settings.
- Ability to connect to gradings, corridors, surfaces, etc.
- Override and integrate into corridor if dropped in an area of the corridor - i.e. driveway apron
This could kind of make the non-alignment based, hard feature grading a bit more like working with the tools we already have but speed things up and make design changes quicker. Some revisions are easier than others.
The last step is then to use your gradings and feature lines to do the daylights, swales and such. These tend to be the artistic, curvy contours that can be built and connected to everything else. Also key is connection to other civil objects.
