Can you get grading to work?

[bijold]

I have tried and I have yet to get the grading commands to work regularly. I can sometimes get grading objects and surfaces to be created, but eventually it screws up and usually corrupts the drawing beyond repair. Does anyone have anything that they have found to make grading more stable? I have found that creating feature lines from polys is more unstable then just drawing feature lines directly. Any more such ideas that can make these functions useful? As of now, I will not even use them unless I save a new drawing and I am prepared to abandon all the work that I am about to do. Thanks in advance.

[Glenn Pope]

Do you have all the service packs installed?

[civil3Dguide]

What version are you using? If you're answer is anything other than 07, I would suggest waiting until you upgrade to use the grading features that don't work very well. Or maybe use something else if you can to create surfaces or contours, like LDT.

[bijold]

Sorry, forgot to mention that I have 2007 and I have installed service pack 1a (and the packs for LDT and CD, not that it matters.). I agree that 2007 works better then 2006, and has many more options for creating feature lines, but it still does not work well. I am mostly trying to daylight to a surface. I have made sure that the surface is well built and that it is defined where I am trying to daylight. Thanks for the quick replies.

[stephen.cowling]

There is a service pack 3 now, and apparently it helps in general... however I'm finding all the same problems as you even with SP3. It's frustrating because the workflow is pretty good, but when you lose half a day to crashes it's pretty to take. I haven't tried creating feature lines directly though - all of mine have been converted from polylines.

Let us know if you have any more ideas for what works and what doesn't, mine seems to be completely random.

[brian.hailey933139]

There is a great paper that Autodesk just put out called Grading Best Practices Supplement that you can download from here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8777904. It does a great job of explaining some of the issues and problems encountered with gradings.

[stephen.cowling]

Thanks Brian!
It doesn't solve my problems yet, but it has some really good info to understand the process better.