Does anyone have a good solution for turning topo lines into meshes? I own the plugin Splineland, but that creates lumps and dips wherever there is a sudden change in slope, as well as occasional other inaccuracies. Thanks.
Update: I was just reminded of Max’s Terrain Compound object. That combined with the new retopology modifier works great!
Yep! That is what I use.
“almost impossible to achieve such accurate results in 3ds Max” - I am not sure what makes their plugin better than MAX’s native terrain. I went to trial, but it wants payment first. It is pricey, so I am out without an actual free trial.
For me the interesting part would be ability to add roads to the terrain model. I have also used the Mega-fiers terrain plug-in.However it doesn’t work well here north of latitude 60.
I know there’s available our national land survey terrain models as ASCII grid format. However I don’t know how to import those into 3DS Max.
Isn’t Cityscape capable to make terrain with roads? Cityscape Pro for 3DS Max – 45 day trial now available. – CGPress
@JuhaHo There is a viewer called ERDAS ER Viewer that will allow you to save out a high res tiff of terrain to use as displacement etc.
That came in very handy on a recent project as it deals with other survey formats too.
If you can access version 6 of Max then there is an import script on Scriptspot too.
Don’t know how useful these may be but that seems to be the only available option, although @_Lele suggested in another post that it was simple to Maxscript this import 
I’m still using the old Populate:Terrain script from Marc Lorenz
GitHub - mxdsa/populateTerrain: update of maxscript populateTerrain originally written by Marc Lorenz · GitHub (make sure to get the 1.87 version)
Outputs contour lines directly to quads, with resolution control.
If you do use max compound terrain object and retopology, try using normalize spline modifier on the topo spline object first. Makes for a cleaner more organized result