I've been trying to figure out how to make this work with no luck...It seems USGS has changed their format from .dem or .ddf to SDTS,  on Geocommunity.com there are posts for creating Python Scripts to back convert to the older formats (which Vue uses) I tried to make sense of this conversion process, but have no working programming knowledge, and dont understand the language. I'm wondering if anyone has figured this out or has knowledge of where to obtain .dem or .ddf files....Ultimately I just want to be able to recreate specific accurate realworld terrains, so high res greyscale topographical maps could also work, but I've been unable to find any...I've been dorking around with creating greyscale elevations over captured jpegs from google Earth... the theory is sound, but the process is tedious at best and still requires serious editing in Vue (there's shelving) I could probably make better use of Photoshops smudge/blur functions hmmm... anyway...DEMS would be the best (most accurate) solution, but any links for topographical maps or workflow solutions would be appreciated