I finally figured out how to use Corel draw to make .ai files to use with cross-sections. Old news to most of you I'm sure but maybe someone will benefit from this. First Image: (lower right hand corner.) A jpg inage was derived from the fractal generating program kaos-rhei.

Second Image: (upper right hand corner.)
In Corel OCR-Trace the jpg is converted to a black and white image with a threshold of 128 (a lower number would be more solid) and then inverted, traced as an outline and saved as a (Vector) version seven .AI file exporting text as curves, and all the convert and simulate boxes checked.

Third image: (main image)
In the spline model of Carrara the .AI is imported with crossection one selected.
the inport took less than two seconds. cheers, -TJ