I was just reading through my 3ds max manual...I'm always finding new things in it...and I've never really associated 3d studio much with mapping...until now...There's a tool thats built in called Terrain...it takes contour data and converts it into a 3d mesh easily. I'm going to experiment with it now, so expect screenshots and files...

In the meantime...has anyone considered using something like this in the past? I'm going to try and come up with an easy workflow to convert cc2 contours into 3ds max contours.