Salut. I have a lot of closed and opened plines in dwg file, that I can’t close because of the geometry and that are in 3D spases (z value). What is the best technique to make a topography surface in this case in max. Thank you.

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Select one spline. Attach the others. Use the Terrain Compound Object.

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

There is also an interesting thread on CGarchitect.com discussing the various ways to create terrains for MAX.

CGarchitect Thread

This is a subject I would love to find a better technique for.  Currently I use Terrain--first I create contours manually (I NEVER use imported surveys as is--asking for trouble).  Then I create “envelope” shapes around roads, dirt, lawn areas etc, extrude them, and use them in Volume Select modifiers to the terrain to set the face IDs.  This works ok but is quite unwieldy, as Terrain requires an actual vertex at every point you need to have mesh vertices. 

What I would love would be a “Turbo-Terrain” which would preserve each contour as an edge and keep all input vertices, but adding interpolation steps both along the contours and also between the contours..omg that would be so nice.

--3ds Max Design 2009 64bit, Direct3D 9, Win Vista Premium 64, 3ghz quadcore Xeon, Quadro FX1700--

what i often do with this kind of inputsplines is use the surface modifier ...
only downside is that you have to create all connections between the geolines so that you have no more then 4 verts to a closed area.

3ds Max 2009 Design - XpPro 32bit SP2
Dual Intel Xeon 2.3GHz - 4Gb Ram - nVidia GeForce 7600gt

You can apply a Normalise Spline before Terrain, to avoid a crazy poly count and get a more even mesh, at the expense of some detail.

too , after having triangulated terrain , make a plane with quad subdivision over it , and apply a conform object , then you will have the terrain ,
but on quads .