Extra Content - Creating Excavation Lifts and Benching

Simulating your excavation in lifts will allow you to visualize and communicate the excavation process, ensuring efficient and safe movement of material throughout the excavation. Creating lifts in cmBuilder can be done easily using a few tips outlined below.

1. Create your first cut by sketching around the building outline or excavation footprint
   • Tip: Use the Project from 3D sketch tool to quickly outline the Slab on Grade or other elements from your 3D model.
2. Specify the cut depth to be your desired lift height (5ft in the example).
3. Duplicate the building outline cut.
4. Click and drag the duplicated cut into the subsequent milestone and edit the depth to 10ft.
   • Note: If you are creating many lifts, you may wish to apply a slight offset to the sketch to avoid coplanar faces and improve performance. See: Extra Content - Optimizing your excavation
5. Repeat this process for other lifts.
   • Tip: You can also apply an offset to the sketch, as seen below, to easily incorporate benching.
6. Voila!