AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2012 Essentials: Autodesk® Official Training Guide: Essential

Understanding Grading

Grading is the term that is most often used to describe the shaping of the land as a construction or design activity. From a design perspective, it is usually considered different than corridor design which is also a form of terrain shaping but most often used for long, uniform, linear designs such as roads, channels, and so on. The term grading is typically used to describe shaping the land in small areas or modeling features that are not long and uniform.

The final product of a grading design will be a surface—the same type of object that you used to model the existing terrain in Chapter 4. As you may recall, to create a surface representing existing ground (EG) elevations, you use breaklines drawn along linear terrain ...