importing DWG contours

[Jefferson]

I have been self-educating with ArcMap, the defacto Autocad of the GIS world, with the end goal of generating better meshes for my site plans.

One can extract pretty accurate real world conditions from LiDAR, convert it to contours set to intervals of your choice, and then export as .DWGs. no more fabricating terrains........and nice site plans as well.

Problem is they always come in as many, many small lines co-joined rather than polylines or splines. Is there any simple process I'm missing, or have forgotten beyond magic-wanding these series of abutting lines with the polyline or spline tool? I have been told in Autocad it is simply a PE command, polyline edit and they are all joined.

Trying this in ArchiCAD, [unify lines], with anything but the smallest area per attempt sent my machine into fits and eventually I just killed the program.

thanks in advance!

[Laszlo Nagy]

Line Consolidation command maybe?

[Jefferson]

Thanks for the reply Laszlo..........didn't have a noticeable effect. I tried configuring the output with a few of the options toggled on or off, no difference that I could see.

The unify line tool does the job, but Like I said you have to take it chunk by chunk or the machine goes into cardiac arrest.......s l o w.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I see a niche market for an Add-On here.