I hear ya! It’s becoming clear to me that I will need to greatly improve my skills.
On this particular site I had access to 2 out of date surveys from the city and one from an architect. I did not find them all that useful. I find the 2D approach to be difficult to use (more on that). So, this would be one way I might have done the “engineering approach” (yes, it’s janky…):
Then:

That could have been more fine-tuned.
But I’m advocating for a more 3D-in 3D-out approach (and have gotten no traction!).
So to circumvent the 2D survey stuff, I’m using a drone to go straight into 3D:

Then I can process out my own topo:
You can see I chopped some of it out. I made this with 5cm elevations… WAY TOO MUCH. So it needed simplification.
So here, I did not SandBox Tool contours from the survey/“engineering” side (but maybe I should have). But I did SandBox off 3D contours. Just as a quick aside, Undet grabs terrain from point could, so if I had that right now, I would have skipped topo altogether and gone from Point Cloud to mesh.
That seems about right. I know how this sounds, but I’m not a fan of 2D. For example, I can pull measurements from mosaics… but usually I don’t.
It seems to me that there is a bit of a disconnect between designers working in 2D and the build side. There’re are a number of bottlenecks and competing interests, but it looks to me like designers design for the client not for installation (Lots of caveats left out here). So right off the cuff, designers go to 2D.
For example with the image above. Lets say the edge of the retention pond is XXFT from the corner of the building, as the crow flies). But it’s at an elevation several ft lower. Okay, so get your story pole or Zip Level out. You could draw a nice straight line with a dimension/number that is correct. That’s what I consider the 2D way. If designers get into 3D right away, they can place layouts and measurements ‘as the human walks’, or hand over a 3D file instead of a paper plan so the installation crew can just measure ‘where they can go’. 3D-in 3D-out: The work has to be done in the real 3D world, so help the people doing the construction by keeping the design in ‘space’ that is easy to use.
Cover your eyes if you’re offended by horrific scenes of badly mangled mesh:
So here I was playing with SandBox and Artisan (a trial).
One issue here is that I wanted to grade for tiered walls. Smooving and Sculpt brushing was pulling down the terrain that I wanted ‘up’ as the fill in the upper tier. That’s why I started messing around with Instant Grader and Instant Road.
I’ll say that I went back to Artisan and started to like it. It has a sweeping feel to it that can be nice, but when I started to use it like a chisel it became fun.
At this point I think the tools are fine. It’s my skills that need improvement.
I’d have to remove some info from that one. I’ll see about doing that or maybe find some other mesh that has defeated my SketchUp grading abilities in the past.