Civil 3D Best Practice Series: Grading 

Hi, i must say thank you, this was an awsome video, it helps me a lot to unterstand how civil3d works. i am looking forward to your contend. best regards from Germany

Matt, Thanks so much for the entire video - Great info!! Your “Split Points” demo segment starting at minute 20:00 with plan & vertical split-view of the interaction between feature lines of different styles is awesome! For some reason I expected the style priorities to hold true even when connecting feature lines by grip-editing or with object snaps. So would you say that this statement is true? “If a feature line is expressly grip-edited or moved with object snaps to a point on a second feature line the priorities (styles) are ignored for this action. A higher priority feature line will not keep its elevations if a second feature line of lower priority is being connected to it with grips or snaps. This is the case again where the last edited feature line ‘wins’.” I wish for a toggle setting that would maintain the style priorities of feature lines no matter how their overlap or coincidence is achieved. Is there a way for this to be true? By the way - many times I feel that Autodesk “hides” important features or settings like feature line style priority. Does anyone else feel this way too? Thanks, Greg

Interim surfaces are a game changer for site grading. (I call them "auxiliary" surfaces.)

at about 1:17:55 you mentioned getting the existing ground surface and the orthophoto for the site from Infraworks. I know how to get the existing ground surface, but how do you get the orthophoto from Infraworks?

great tip on how to remove those pesky contours that get lost on the level surface

I think you're being much too charitable with Grading Tools. Anybody that works with Civil 3D doing actual projects knows they're unstable, period. Maybe they have improved over the years, but they are nevertheless still unstable enough to never use as a permanent feature of a model, EVER. They're useful as a quick and dirty construction tool, but that's pretty much it. Blue ribbon for the "Delete" option in the EditFeatureCurve command. That is going to pay off quickly! (Edited to capitalize "Grading Tools"--I'm specifically referring to Grading Tools for their instability, not the other much more stable grading features.)

"Unstable grading tool" because its the most misused tool.