Grading building footprints with a Corridor

[dgordon.68443]

I was part of a small site condo project which was to have no inner lot lines. The engineer had designed the roads and had tentative finished floor elevations for his buildings as well as location and rotation of each building in the development. I needed a way to put the buildings in so that we could see what the contours would look like going out to the right of way. My idea was to use an alignment for the building footprint. The size was approximately 150 x 90 square with 10ft radii at each corner. Since you cannot make an alignment out of a closed polyline I left a little space in between the beginning and end of the alignment. Once alignments we done, I made flat profiles of each alignment starting for example at 0 with elev 900 and ending at 900. Each building footprint was then added to the corridor as a baseline. Then I made a region for each one and assigned a assembly which had just a 1ft basic lane to the inside of the alignment at zero percent slope. Once all the building pads were added, we could see how the buildings reacted with the roads. But some of the buildings were between the road and the property line. Something needed to be done in order to see what grading was needed here. I had an existing surface created from survey shoots taken with a gps device mounted on a 4 wheeler. I made a new alignment near the properly line where I wanted my proposed surface to tie into existing. Then for a profile I sampled the existing surface and attached this outer boundary as a baseline in the corridor. again using a very small base lane assembly. Now we could see the contours from existing ground up to the new building footprints.
As you might begin to think, there were some unacceptable slopes between buildings road and edge of property. So adjustments were made including retaining walls, ponds, changing of finished floor elevations, Until we had a design we were happy with. Then they wanted a cut and fill estimate. It was found that we had either to much fill or too much cut I don't remember which. The entire proposed site needed to be lowered 0.84 feet without changing the existing elevations of the boundary of the proposed surface. All I had to do was open each profile of the building foots, road and retaining walls and ponds, and change all the pvi's -0.84 feet. The existing surface of the boundary of course did not change. So the new contours of the proposed surface showed the new relationship between the new design and the existing boundary. One drawback to doing so many alignments was that the stationing mouse over box got so big I couldn't see the bottom of it cause it was off the bottom of the screen. I wish there was a way to limit which alignments were available in the mouse over.

So what do you think? could some of this been done easier with grading tools like feature lines and grading objects? it all worked pretty well, but the drawing got to be pretty slow do to all the alignments and profiles.

[sinc]

So what do you think? could some of this been done easier with grading tools like feature lines and grading objects?

Yes. Feature Lines are much like lightweight alignments/profiles. And Grading Objects are actually designed for this type of grading.

[Hammer.John.J]

I think you could've done this much faster had you drawn the contours by hand and then digitized them with real slopes with elevations and then made a proposed surface from your contours and a few points for critical elevations. Add some feature lines for the walls and building pad and your done with the surface. Do grid method earthwork on it and then lower the entire surface, generate contours from the surface for reference and fix your polyline contours used prior to the surface vert. shift.

I wonder how long it took you to do that process with alignments, versus the reverse method of working from contours.

We've had great success with moving entire surface's up or down .01 feet at a time then modifying the original contours by comparing them to the new contours created from your shifted surface.