I am working on a contour map that I will have to turn into a mesh. In MAX I connected the splines (they were broken where the height labels were) then set them to the heights that were labeled. So I had splines running along the contours at the appropriate heights. In order to import the splines from MAX I had to turn them into extruded sections (think ribbons) I exported an OBJ file and now I have these ribbons in Houdini.

How do I turn these ribbons into splines?segmented poly splines are OK
Just to make it interesting the ribbons have triangulated faces.

Any ideas on how to turn the contour splines into a mesh that represents the contours faithfully?

an image can bee seen here
http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?s=6d846075942c1fb2eacecf695b495b04&act=ST&f=19&t=2044 [odforce.net]

Hey,

Well this might not be what you want to hear but I would say go to
http://martian-labs.com/glue_index.html [martian-labs.com] Export from 3DS Max as a RIB file then import it to Houdini and you should then have splines. You will need Martin's Glue tool to do this. I supect it would work.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

After some more tinkering I found a primitive SOP if you set the
Face/Hull > Close U = * open

then delete one side of the now wireframe ribbon with a delete Sop

you can add a fuse if you like

but the real challenge will be taking the mess of lines and turning them into a representation of the ground.