Make sure you are running Ezigrade 4.0.2.64 or later. Earlier versions don't necessarily support the concepts presented.

 

The inlet of an outlet can be messy. How can we improve this?

 

 

In this Outlet we attempt to create an outlet at a depth of 0.1 feet. THis means at the inlet of the outlet we start at a depth of 0.1 feet. This is what we want for the rest of the outlet but at the start we would normally want to merge into the surface. We have a parameter called an "inlet depth". This sets the height at the start. When we tick this we now overwrite any other parameters between the inlet and the nest point along the outlet. So move your mouse around the start of the outlet and by inspection guess an ideal depth to start at. In this case we think 49.6 is a good height and tick the "Inlet Height" check box to enforce the constraint. Now click on Outlets -> Grade and look at the results.

 

 

You can tweak the value and regrade until you are happy with the result.

 

Nested Outlets:

 

An Outlet can flow into another Outlet. There are no limits to how deep the nesting can go. At present there are a couple of issues to be aware of that still need tweaking.

 

To create a nested outlet. First click in the main / parent outlet. Now draw in the chile outlet that drains into the parent. Start the child close to the center line of the parent. So you would start with something like this:

 

 

You can see the main outlet and there are two outlets flowing north into it. For a painless experience at present do this (we will improve on this):

 

 

To get the outlets in a suitable form for grading then click on the Outlets -> Grid All. We then get this:

 

 

Ezigrade creates an intersection area. You can see the purple lines. It is always worthwhile looking at the triangles and making sure that the contours look correct in the intersection area: