Terrain to isolines and back

[Intuos5]

In order to create terrain that is compatible with Revit, I need to work with terrain isolines. To do this, I would start of with freehand splines (=isolines), use the Terrain Compound object and finally conform a subdivided plane to it to achieve the topology on the bottom left (see attachment). I would then tweak the terrain using the freeform brushes.
However, the conformation step leads to unwanted, excess edges. Is there any other way to create clean topology in a similar fashion?
And secondly, is it possible to extract the isolines from the (tweaked) clean topology in order to use those in Revit as dwg? That way I can modify the terrain and update it along the way. 

Note: the populate script seems to create the wanted result, however it is no longer available from their site. 

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/populate-terrain

[kgokhangurbuz · Accepted solution]

Hello @Intuos5;

You can extract splines from any topology edges easily, please follow this:

-Select the edge loop of geometry

-Under edit edges tab in modify, click on "create shape from selection" command.

-If you select multiple loops and do this, you'll get all splines at once, all attached, or you can do it one by one.

For the clean topology method, I'd simply build a plane and form the shape with free form tools, or apply a "displace" modifier and use a height map in bitmap slot.

Kind regards;

[Intuos5]

First of all thanks for your help, I'm guessing that displacement mapping is also the way to go to moddel real world terrain, rather than the tedius tracing over from isolines. I completely forgot about that. 

The Extract Shape from Edge button does not result into isolines, the edges are not planar. This means that I cannot set one closed spline to be 5m high and another one say 10m high. In the attachment you can see the difference between the isolines that are flat (no z-axis changes) compared to the extruded edges in the middle. 

[Intuos5]

Using slice plane and then create shape does the trick.