Help needed with a terrain editing/texturing issue.

[Crysantha Lafleur]

I need to find someone that is very knowledgeble with the ins and outs of Terraforming and Ground Textures.

Firstly - I noticed the other day that when I was terraforming, one side of the sim liked being low, and the other liked being high.  I had lifted some land on the west side, then decided I needed to smooth it out... The far EAST edge began to drop straight down after a little.  Like it wanted to be lower.. When I did the same along the west side, the very western edge, did not do that.   Is this normal in all sims?  And if it is, should a person take that into consideration when they wish to transition from low to high ground? 

Secondly -   My project is to create a transition from a low lying sand region, up to a mountain terrain.  If I am going to do, sand, sand, rocky sand, mountain.  How can I effectively transition from one to the other .. I think I may need a how to video or something.  I am having trouble grasping the low/high number concept or something.  It needs to be a rather abrupt change from sand to mountain.. low flat city for 2/3 of the sim then up a mountain slope

Anyone know of someone that can help me understand how to do this.

Thank you  Crysantha

[hibit Spad]

Did you buy a sim? If not, then there are limits to how much you can change the terrain height by. When each bit of land was created LL shaped it and so each spot of land has a elevation it was given the serves as its base height. Most mainland is limited to elevation change of +-4 meters. So each spot can be raised or lowered 4 meters from it's base (original) height. On the textures, if you did not buy a sim then you have no access to the estate tools which is where you would change the land textures. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Terraforming

[Crysantha Lafleur]

Umm..   Sorry I should have said.. I have owned up to 6 private sims, and I know how to edit the land and things.. It is not my sim I am altering, it belongs to another person.. but yeah.. its private and will have the range set to allow -+100. 

To alter the terrain textures and things all you have to do is be a region manager, you dont have to own the land.  You  can't bake it or anything, the owner has to do that.

On my own sims the terraforming I did wasn't extreme levels with a wide difference in textures.. And the terrain textures have all been in the same type.. like dirt, grass, grassy rock and mountain.  For the most part I never needed to mess with the default settings the  textures were set too.. I just modified the land and I guess I lucked out on them transitioning as I wanted.  

The sim in question is not going to be accessible for 2 more weeks, but I thought I would try to get an answer to things before I go in and try to do something that could be easier if I worked with any specific peculiarities there might be in regards to doing what I want to do.   Like.. is it easier to go low to high, from east to west, or north to south.. etc..And the texture lows and highs

[Ceera Murakami]

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Crysantha Lafleur wrote:

I need to find someone that is very knowledgeble with the ins and outs of Terraforming and Ground Textures.

Firstly - I noticed the other day that when I was terraforming, one side of the sim liked being low, and the other liked being high.  I had lifted some land on the west side, then decided I needed to smooth it out... The far EAST edge began to drop straight down after a little.  Like it wanted to be lower.. When I did the same along the west side, the very western edge, did not do that.   Is this normal in all sims?  And if it is, should a person take that into consideration when they wish to transition from low to high ground? 

Secondly -   My project is to create a transition from a low lying sand region, up to a mountain terrain.  If I am going to do, sand, sand, rocky sand, mountain.  How can I effectively transition from one to the other .. I think I may need a how to video or something.  I am having trouble grasping the low/high number concept or something.  It needs to be a rather abrupt change from sand to mountain.. low flat city for 2/3 of the sim then up a mountain slope

Anyone know of someone that can help me understand how to do this.

Thank you  Crysantha

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For your first problem, that sounds like an issue with a different terrain height in the adjacent sim, and the fact that you don't own the land on the other side. One thing I noticed is that terrain height changes applied to a selected area of land tend to have issues like that at the edges. On the other hand, using the manual 'bulldozer' brush tool will affect the adjacent parcel a bit as well, making a smoother transition at the edge. It takes some experimenting there - you can't use one hard and fast rule for edge effects.

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For the second issue, I am afraid you'll find that an abrupt and predictable change in terrain textures is impossible to position with the terrain textures. The only way to make an abrupt and precisely positioned transition is with prims that have a terrain texture applied to them.

Terrain textures are always blended at the transitions, and a certain amount of viewer-side randomization is unavoidably built into the system.

You have 4 textures in a sim. You can specify the aproximate height of the transition between the first and second texture, and of the third and fourth textures. The transition between two and three is always halfway between what you specified for those two that you can control. You also are specifying these heights at the four corners of the sim. If you think of those four corners as anchored to the corners of a rubber sheet, you get an idea of how they affect the area between them. If the height is the same at all four corners, the sheet is flat, sim-wide. If the south pair are the same, and the North pair are higher but equal to each other, you get a flat slope, from South to North. Raise just one corner, and that corner streaches upward, just like a rubber sheet.

Example of flat transitions, sim-wide :

Texture 4 Mountain

"High" transition = 40, all 4 corners

Texture 3 Rocky sand

Interpolated 'Middle" transition will be = ( (High - Low) / 2 ) + Low = ((40-20)/2)+20 = 30

Texture 2 Sand

"Low" transition = 20, all 4 corners

Texture 1 Sand

Now... add a subjective (changes for each person looking at it, randomized by their viewer) +/- 3 Meters random factor to the actual transition point, and blur the transition for 4 to 5 Meters from that randomized value, at each corner!

Result? Even though you asked for the rocky sand to mountain transition to appear at 40 Meters, it could be as low as 37 and as high as 43 Meters at the middle of the blending, and that blended area will be several meters wide.

[Crysantha Lafleur]

Thank you so much for that answer regarding the terrain textures.  That type of thing is exactly what was happening to me.  I thought maybe I was just doing something wrong. 

And the high low thing on the sim I had experienced.. was an idependent island with nothing other than linden water around the edges, no other sims even on the map that touched at the corners.. that is what I found so weird.  I was at water level, 20 meters.. had sand.. on the west i would raise the edge.. it was around 25 meters... raised the same on the east side.. South was a gentle slope below the water to perhaps 10 meters below the surface.  I was going for a gentle slope into the center of the south side... I even made sure I had not selected the very outer edge of either the west or east side, had one grid square away from them.  When I hit smooth in small increments.. the western edge stayed where I wanted it, the  eastern edge dropped down, it was just very weird.  On this new sim before I begin anything, it will be a flat surface, and will look further into it, see if I can get it to reproduce.

Thank you again for that answer.  I will lower the expectations of my clients, so they will understand there will be limitations due to SL. 

[Juliana Wickentower]

Here's a terraforming hud, took me a little bit to learn how to get it to work, but once I got use to it, best thing I ever bought for editing the land around my sim, plus if it doesn't work for you, send a notecard to the creater for an 80% refund,

 

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Land-Modifier-Hud/5208476

[Rolig Loon]

The best single discussion of how terrain textures work is at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Creating_Terrain_Textures

It's nicely laid out and well-illustrated.