Beta. Terrain grading is part of the new site view, available on request. Contact your Customer Success Manager to turn it on for your site.
Grading is the first big milestone on a solar build. Owners and EPCs need to know whether the earthworks contractor is on track, but progress is usually checked with survey crews and spreadsheets, weeks apart.
Did you know Sitemark's Earthworks tool compares every drone capture with the engineer's grading design, and shows which areas are on grade and which still need cut or fill?
Here is how it works, step by step, on a site from its first flight to the end of grading:
Step 1: Compare the first flight with the grading design
Open the site in the new site view, go to Explore and open the Earthworks tool on the left of the map. Pick the capture at the bottom of the map and set Compared with to t
he grading design (type part of its name to find it).
Sitemark shows:
On grade: the share of the designed area within tolerance of the design, here 8% within ±0.05 m, with the split above design, on grade and below design.
Cut and fill on the map: red where the ground is still above design (cut), blue where it is still below design (fill), green where it is on grade.
Cut, fill and net volume still to move to reach the design.
Step 2: Follow grading flight by flight
Pick the next capture. Three months later, 71% of the site is on grade, and the map shows exactly where the remaining cut and fill is.
Step 3: See how much earth was moved between flights
Set Compared with to the earlier capture instead of the design. The map and the totals now show what was cut and filled between the two flights.
Step 4: Measure one area
To check a single stockpile, pond or pad, open Measure on the left of the map, pick Volume and draw the area. You get its cut, fill and net volume, compared with an interpolated surface, a flat level, an earlier capture or the design.
Outcome
After every flight, the team sees without a survey crew:
How much of the site is on grade
Which areas still need cut or fill, and how much volume is left
How much earth was moved since the last flight
Whether grading is on track before the piling crews arrive
What you need
A grading design surface in your design files. This is the engineer's target surface as a 3D triangulated model (TIN), often called the proposed landform or finished grade surface, exported from Civil 3D or similar as a DXF with 3D faces. Contour lines or a 2D layout are not enough: Sitemark needs a height for every point of the designed area. See How to make your dxf file Sitemark compatible.
Flights with high absolute accuracy. Comparing with a design needs every flight to sit at the right height, not just look sharp. A small height offset adds up fast: 5 cm over 5.7 ha is about 2,850 m³ of volume that is not really there.
Ground control points give the most reliable height: a few surveyed points on site tie every flight to the same reference.
RTK with a base station also works, as long as the base is set up on a known, surveyed point. A base on an unknown point can shift the whole flight up or down from one capture to the next.
Good to know
Grading is not a deviation. Piles, fences and other components are checked one by one, see How to identify and manage deviations in construction. Grading is one continuous surface, so Sitemark shows how far the whole site is from the design instead.
The drone sees the surface, not bare earth. Panels, equipment, stockpiles and vegetation stand above the ground, so they show as above design. Grading results are most useful before structures go in.
Only the area your design covers is compared.