Thanks ct...that is a help. I will point out however, that a complex terrain similar to what I do at work (see above) with multiple contours would take forever!! That image I posted is a small one and I could have cleaned it a little in civilcad (delete points (vertices)) but lose a little accuracy (depends what you want) has a total of 14 000 points....and thats just the contours! So linework would be intense and it would take you ages to loft all of that.

Here is the same image with contours only...the roads have 0.1 and 0.25m contours...the rest have 0.25 and 0.5m contours...and ALL of the polylines run in different directions (vectors) as when they design it, they dont care which way the lines go! so you can see doing something like an estate by lofting would be a right royal pain in the coight.

cheers bullet