I have a surface consisiting of about 56,000 triangular 3D Faces that were created in Autodesk Land Development Desktop from a countour grading plan.  What is the best way to make this easily usable in Viz or Max so I can add roadways, parking lots and curbing, etc.?  I imported it from the AutoCAD format, welded the verticies, and added a smooth modifier.  It still looks bumpy and freezes up when I try to mesh in roadways, etc from polylines imported from AutoCAD.  Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.  This is being used for a project that has some existing roadways and entrace into a proposed shopping center.

Thanks in advance.........

I would probably import the actual contour lines into Max and then make a toposurface within Max. It seems to me that Max would create a toposurface that was optimized for use within Max. AutoCAD doesn’t optimize for 3d in any way. If you have the choice and/or ability to use LDD on the file, try to simplify the surface by weeding the contour vertices so that you don’t have so many faces. But I would just use the contour lines themselves to generate the topo within Max.

Post the file and I’ll have a shot at it.

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