Terrain confusion

[lisamartine]

Hi, I am getting confused building my terrain, as it's the first time I've attempted to build terrain. I have a map of the contours which I have put in to CA using elevation splines and have put their elevation height in at 100, 200, 300 etc (rising at 1 metre). But then when I build the terrain all the contour lines which appear are at a height much lower than i have put on the elevation spleen. For example on is at only 0.3 metres where I have put an elevation spleen of 5 metres? the resulting slope is therefore much much less steep than i intended.
Why does this happen? What am I doing wrong?

[Dean]

Under the terrain preference in the general tab there is a check box for smoothing. By using LOW the elevation splines will be closer to the entered data. But the terrain may get jagged or angular without a high or custom triangle count.

By using HIGH you may miss the elevations due to interpolation from one point to the next.

Also in the contour tab you could turn contour line smoothing on this will help the generated contours come closer to the spline data.

It may be possible to place elevation points to adjust Chief's interpolation.

Above all, LESS is MORE. This means you can often generate a more accurate terrain with less data. elevation points are generally better than spline data. The spline enters a long series of data which in many cases could be replaced by just a few elevation points. Fewer data means faster terrain generation.

[Aaron]

The terrain elevation line/spline dialog takes elevations in millimeters. So you must type in 1000, 2000, 3000 for 1, 2, 3 meters.

[lisamartine]

OOOPS THANKS!