Free grading tool
Feature lines in. Drafted contours out.
Draw feature lines and spot elevations on your own site plan PDF, and get smoothed minor and index contours. Free, in the browser, with no CAD seat.
Grading studio
Open a PDF plan
Any PDF site plan, survey, or exhibit. It renders right in your browser. The sheet you view is processed in memory on our servers and never stored there, and a copy stays in your browser so you can pick up where you left off.
Draw feature lines
Ridge, swale, or pad edge: click vertices along the line and set an elevation or a % grade at each one, the way you would with Civil 3D feature lines. Close the loop for a building pad, or drop single spot elevations.
Get drafted contours
Your feature lines become breaklines in a live surface. Vellum drafts smoothed minor and index contours at your interval, labeled like real linework, and plots them into a PDF you can download.
This is one tool. Vellum is the whole drafting table.
Vector-precise markup, dimensions, offsets, callouts, and sheet-to-sheet review, cloud-native and built for civil work. The grading tool runs on the same vector engine that renders drawings in Vellum.
Start free trialSee the hours and CAD seats your firm gets back
Every grading study is hours of building surfaces, feature lines, and contours in CAD. This free tool drafts the same contours in the browser, and Vellum lets reviewers mark up grading without CAD. Move the sliders to see what that's worth to your firm each year.
Your firm
Drag to match your team.
You could save, every year
$53,600
Reclaim 288 hours (about 7 work-weeks) and drop 4 CAD seats for senior engineers who only redline. They mark up grading in the browser instead of holding a Civil 3D license they barely open.
- Time reclaimed
- $43,200
- Licenses dropped
- $10,400
Estimate based on your inputs; assumes Vellum removes ~60% of per-study CAD time. Actual results vary by firm and workflow.