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Michael Kinnear/5 min read

Creating Grading Object Styles for Future Drawings in Civil 3D

Grading Style Components

Display Properties

Visibility of points, daylight lines, projection lines.

Color and Layer

Set per project standards.

Style Inheritance

Build hierarchy from base styles to project-specific overrides.

Save in Template

Save styles in a project template for instant reuse.

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This Civil 3D tutorial walks through creating grading object styles for future drawings in civil 3d, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

So in this video, we're going to go ahead and create another Object Style. This time we're going to be dealing with Grading Objects.

These are objects that we're going to be dealing with in future videos. We want to go ahead and set up the Object Styles for our drawing that we're going to be using in future videos. So to do that, we're going to go ahead and navigate back to the Settings tab.

I'm going to expand out Grading. I'm going to expand out Grading Styles. And I'm going to be creating two new Grading Styles.

I'm going to be creating a Grading Style for Fill Grading Objects and Cut Grading Objects. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Grading Styles, right-click, select new. From here, I'm going to go in here and type Cut for one of them.

And I'm going to go ahead and go to my next tab, which is Center Marker. So this is an object that will be placed at the center of your grading object and what size of the screen it would fill up or what the plotted or fixed size would be. So I'm going to go ahead and go with percentage of screen.

I'm going to go ahead and leave it as 2%. So moving to the next one, which is Slope Patterns. These are patterns that will be displayed on your grading object.

So you can either have them turned on or turned off. And then if you have them turned on, you can have them based on a certain slope range. So a minimum slope range or a maximum slope range, or you can have them just always placed.

And that would be if you left this unchecked. So I'm going to go ahead and check this and leave it as basic and choose to move on to the next Display option. We're leaving Slope Pattern checked under basic, and I'm going to go next to Display.

So from here, we have the options for your Center Marker, your Daylight Line, so where your grading object intersects the surface, a Projection Line, Internal Edges, Solid Shading, and Slope Patterns. So what I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to go ahead and turn off Solid Shading. I'm going to leave Internal Edges, Projection Line, Daylight Line, Center Marker, but I'm going to go ahead and put these objects onto different layers.

I'm going to go ahead and put these onto our C Topo grading, but this one is going to be for our cut. So I'm going to go ahead and go with C Topo grad cuts. I'm going to go ahead and click OK.

And so what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go ahead and change this to by layer and click OK. And then I'm going to do that to the remainder of these objects that we have turned on. So I'm going to go ahead and go back in here, navigate down to C Topo grad cuts, click OK.

I'm just marching my way up. So C Topo grad cuts, C Topo grad cuts, C Topo grad cuts. And then I'm going to make sure that these are all by layer.

So this one's green. I'm going to go ahead and change this to by layer and click OK. Now we'll have all of the objects inside of our drawing showing up on C Topo grad cuts and being displayed by layer with Solid Shading turned off.

So inside of our drawing, we can change these parameters, but these are what our project file will start off originally until we make any edits. So I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit OK. Now we have our Cut Grading Style.

Now I'm going to do a Fill Grading Style by selecting new. I'm going to go to the information tab. I'm going to type in Fill.

I'm going to go to my Center Marker, leave it as 2% and percentage of screen. I'm going to go to Slope Pattern. For fill, I'm not going to turn on my Slope Pattern.

We'll have two indications of what is fill and what is cut. One is going to be the slope patterns. The other is going to be how we display.

So I'm going to go again, turn off Solid Shading, but this time I'm going to go and change the layers. And this time I'm going to go to C Topo grad fill. We're doing a grading style of fill, C Topo grad fill.

I'm going to go ahead and click OK. I'm going to change this to by layer. Click OK.

I'm going to go ahead and change my Internal Edges, Projection Line, Daylight Line, and Center Marker all to the C Topo grad fill. So I'm going to click on the zero. I'm going to navigate to the layer I want to select.

I'm going to choose fill. I'm going to go OK, navigate to the next one and continue onwards. We're going to be C Topo grad fill, C Topo grad fill, C Topo grad fill.

And then I'm going to go ahead and select this green. I'm going to go to by layer and click OK. I'm going to hit apply and then I'm going to hit OK.

Now that we've created our Cut and Fill Grading Styles, I'm going to go ahead and go up and save. And then I'll meet you in the next video.