Existing Ground surface from supplied contours

[bluedogt]

I am returning to using ACAD after several years away and have forgotten many of the things I use to know, so this may sound like a stupid question to some of you, but here goes.
First I have a data set from an aerial surveyor, it consists of contours, shots are shown but not accessable, its a DWG file. My question is how can I get the contours into a useable surface for use with all the features such as profiles, site and grading plans, etc. The version is 2004.
can anyone help? I have been through the tutorials and they all seem to have the contours in the right place to use them, none of these show hay to get to the place from a given set of "imported" contours like one gets from and aerial surveor. :(

[CADTutor]

bluedogt, welcome to our forum.

In order to do all of the things you want will requre a little more than basic AutoCAD. You'll need to use something like Land Desktop or any one of the other terrain modelling ad-ons.

In any case, to go from contours to profiles etc. you first need to create a TIN (Triangular Irregular Network). This is usually an external file and forms a triangulated mathematical model of the surface. This file is then used to do all the other stuff - cut and fill etc.

In order to create a TIN, you'll need Land Desktop or something similar.

You can get an idea of the sort of processes involved by looking at http://www.cadtutor.net/acad/ktf/ground/ground.html