Gouge-free tool-path generation is an important issue in mold & die machining and researches on cutter interference avoidance can be found in many articles. One of the various methods is construction of tool-offset surface of cutter-location (CL) surface on which the cutter-center point (CL-point) locates. Provided that the CL surface is represented in a suitable form, cutter-interference avoidance can be performed without the burden of computing CL data for every cutter-contact (CC) point. In the paper, various methods of constructing a CL surface in the z-map form are presented, where z-map is a special form of discrete nonparametric representation in which the height values at grid points on the xy-plane are stored as a 2D array z[i,j].