Tutorials CivilCraft help Walkthroughs
House platforms on sloped sites
Grade a pad on a hillside: retaining walls as pad edges, the cut and fill map shaded by depth with spot levels (plan and 3D), a section drawn anywhere through the ground and the design, and ramps or sloped pads for driveways.
Written for CivilCraft 0.8. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
A house platform is a pad (Design › Pad): a flat polygon at one level, graded into the ground. Four things help on a slope.
Retaining walls as pad edges
Select the pad and set a side to Vertical (retaining wall) instead of a slope (Properties › Sides and retaining walls, or Vertical: retaining walls for every side at once). The wall's height is read from the ground along it: top at the ground, bottom at the pad, shown at both ends and at its tallest point on the plan, with a warning when it is taller than the limit you set. Walls and slopes can be mixed side by side.
The cut and fill map
Tick Cut and fill map under Show. The plan is shaded by how deep the cut or fill is, in equal steps (cut warm, fill blue, nearly level pale) with a legend, and spot levels are printed on the pad: the change in level at points on a grid, and the deepest cut and the highest fill marked ▲. The cells are the same ones the earthwork volumes use, so the map and the numbers always agree.
In the 3D view, choose Cut and fill from the colour list to drape the same colours over the ground and the design.
A swell or shrink factor is in the mass-haul tool (Design › Mass haul); it is not applied to a pad's volumes.
A free section
Under Surface › More, choose Free section, click the points of the section line anywhere (it may bend) and press ReturnEnter. A dialog draws the section: the existing ground, the graded design (dashed) and the cut and fill between them, shaded, with their areas (the design counts only inside the pads and roads). Vertical exaggeration defaults to fit the drawing; Save as SVG and Save as CSV give you a drawing for the council and the numbers.
Ramps and sloped pads
Under Surface › More, choose Ramp or sloped pad, click the low end and then the high end, press ReturnEnter, and give the width, the level at the low end and the grade. The pad is a strip whose corners carry those levels (the edge between two corners runs at a constant grade), and it grades into the ground like any pad. Any pad's corners can also carry their own levels, so a driveway, a ramp or a tilted terrace is a pad with a level on each corner.