is it possible to download a region's custom terrain textures?

[Mia Ichibara]

is it possible to download a private region's custom uploaded terrain textures as a tga file or an in-game texture?

or is it possible to find the texture and somehow obtain it otherwise, either as a tga or png file? thank you!

[Rolig Loon]

Some standard terrain textures used on the Mainland are in the Textures subfolder in the Library folder at the bottom of your inventory.  You are free to copy and use those on any project, including a private region.  The textures on a private region are installed by the region's owner and are not generally transferable.  You can always ask the owner where she bought them, to get copies for yourself, but you cannot copy them legally from the land itself.  

[Rolig Loon]

9 minutes ago, bunniepaw said:

copying it wouldnt be infringing on intellectual property rights as far as im aware.

Copying anything that someone else created without their permission is always an intellectual property infringement.  The fact that it is technically possible and that some people do it is no excuse for you to do it too.  Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act for an overview of how intellectual property rights are protected by law in the U.S.  Note that creative works do not need to have a registered copyright to be protected under the law.  

 

[Mia Ichibara]

55 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Some standard terrain textures used on the Mainland are in the Textures subfolder in the Library folder at the bottom of your inventory.  You are free to copy and use those on any project, including a private region.  The textures on a private region are installed by the region's owner and are not generally transferable.  You can always ask the owner where she bought them, to get copies for yourself, but you cannot copy them legally from the land itself.  

is screenshotting + uploading the screenshots as region textures allowed?

[Rolig Loon]

46 minutes ago, bunniepaw said:

is screenshotting + uploading the screenshots as region textures allowed?

No.  Absolutely not.  

Read your Linden Lab TOS:

2.7 You agree to respect the Intellectual Property Rights of other users, Linden Lab, and third parties.

You agree that you will not publish, or submit to any part of the Service, any Content that is protected by Intellectual Property Rights or otherwise subject to proprietary rights, including trade secret or privacy rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from the rightful owner to upload, publish, or submit the Content and to grant Linden Lab and users of the Service all of the license rights granted in these Terms. etc.   ... etc ....

Read the whole thing.

[Nick0678]

48 minutes ago, bunniepaw said:

is screenshotting + uploading the screenshots as region textures allowed?

Well legally the answer is nope but then again are they copyrighted material and who is the owner?

Who knows... Just ask them what textures package they use, usually it's one from MP if it's not LL.

[Mia Ichibara]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

No.  Absolutely not.  

Read your Linden Lab TOS:

2.7 You agree to respect the Intellectual Property Rights of other users, Linden Lab, and third parties.

You agree that you will not publish, or submit to any part of the Service, any Content that is protected by Intellectual Property Rights or otherwise subject to proprietary rights, including trade secret or privacy rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from the rightful owner to upload, publish, or submit the Content and to grant Linden Lab and users of the Service all of the license rights granted in these Terms. etc.   ... etc ....

Read the whole thing.

ive actually read the tos. people constantly upload textures that break that specific rule. the uploader of the terrain i liked actually ripped the pngs off of a royalty free grass texture website (which i found out after reverse searching) so copying it wouldnt be infringing on intellectual property rights as far as im aware.

[Mollymews]

27 minutes ago, bunniepaw said:

ive actually read the tos. people constantly upload textures that break that specific rule. the uploader of the terrain i liked actually ripped the pngs off of a royalty free grass texture website (which i found out after reverse searching) so copying it wouldnt be infringing on intellectual property rights as far as im aware.

if the texture has been made available by the creator on an external website then you can get it from there legitimately and upload to SL

[Mia Ichibara]

30 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Copying anything that someone else created without their permission is always an intellectual property infringement.  The fact that it is technically possible and that some people do it is no excuse for you to do it too.  Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act for an overview of how intellectual property rights are protected by law in the U.S.  Note that creative works do not need to have a registered copyright to be protected under the law.  

 

even if the works are uploaded publicly by the owner who is directly giving anyone explicit permission to use them for any non-commercial purpose? presumably like a royalty free license? i dont know much about copyright but thats my understanding of what royalty free means

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, bunniepaw said:

even if the works are uploaded publicly by the owner who is directly giving anyone explicit permission to use them for any non-commercial purpose?

If that's the case, then obviously the creator has given permission.  The concept really isn't all that hard to understand. It's what your Mom taught you: "It's not nice to take things that don't belong to you."  Get permission or don't do it.  😉

[Mollymews]

3 minutes ago, bunniepaw said:

even if the works are uploaded publicly by the owner who is directly giving anyone explicit permission to use them for any non-commercial purpose? presumably like a royalty free license? i dont know much about copyright but thats my understanding of what royalty free means

is always best to obtain creative works from the creator either directly or thru a website/store where the creator has made their works available, rather than make assumptions when we are not sure

[Mia Ichibara]

9 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

If that's the case, then obviously the creator has given permission.  The concept really isn't all that hard to understand. It's what your Mom taught you: "It's not nice to take things that don't belong to you."  Get permission or don't do it.  😉

thanks for the clarification, i'd only originally asked because my understanding of copyright is limited, i didn't know prior that uploading someone else's region textures would be infringement.

9 hours ago, Mollymews said:

is always best to obtain creative works from the creator either directly or thru a website/store where the creator has made their works available, rather than make assumptions when we are not sure

okay, thanks. i'll download the textures from the website if i ever want to use them.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 8/5/2020 at 1:52 PM, bunniepaw said:

even if the works are uploaded publicly by the owner who is directly giving anyone explicit permission to use them for any non-commercial purpose? presumably like a royalty free license? i dont know much about copyright but thats my understanding of what royalty free means

You may be misunderstanding the idea of Royalty Free. The idea is I can buy the image and use it as often as I want. Think using it on a cereal box. One image used on a million boxes.

Authors get a royalty on each book sold. So too would a royalty-required image need to pay a fee for each cereal box on which the image appears.

[Chic Aeon]

There ARE perfectly legal completely free textures that you can use. These are Creative Commons (different rules apply to different "levels" of creative commons but one is free to use with no strings type of thing AND Public Domain.   So anyone reading this can look up those type of licenses to see the difference. As mentioned "royalty free"  is NOT a pass along to anyone type of license.  

Edited August 19, 2020 by Chic Aeon
spelling

[animats]

Second Life Grid Survey will show you an image of each sim from above, with or without objects on it. This is the same data as the Second Life map. No elevation data, though.

Ahern, the terrain map. Without, and with, the object overlay. Yes, ads will show up in the object overlay, just like in the SL map. Textures are 256x256, so this is too low-rez to create a new region. The map is not the territory.

I once wanted the elevation data for regions, so I could make a map of SL like Google Earth. You're allowed to take pictures in SL, and access the map tiles, so that should be OK. With no elevation data, I had to settle for making a slippy map of SL - you can pan and tilt and zoom and fly over, but it's still a flat map.

Here and there in SL, people have made tabletop maps with this data. There's one at the Zindra Help Vortex, way out of date.

I've been interested in this data for a possible viewer feature to show low-rez impostors of sims outside the draw range. The goal is to get the look of a huge draw distance without slowing everything down. Nice for sailing and flying - you could see where you're going.

[Qie Niangao]

On 8/5/2020 at 3:07 PM, bunniepaw said:

is screenshotting + uploading the screenshots as region textures allowed?

Besides being illegal, it doesn't sound practical. The terrain texture shown in the viewer on the terrain itself is manipulated in a complex blend of the elevation-specific textures before they're rendered in the viewer (lighting and all). The window where those textures are specified (Terrain tab of Region/Estate dialog) uses tiny thumbnails of the 512x512 textures. Probably the texture UUIDs are shipped to the viewer to paint those thumbnails. Now that I think about it I'm not sure whether the viewer or a server does that elevation-specific blending.

11 hours ago, animats said:

I once wanted the elevation data for regions...

Hmm. There's llGround() but it would be pretty time- and data-intensive to collect point elevations across every region you wanted to map.

I wonder, though... you'd probably want the objects, too, so in theory one could take one's own "satellite images" of each region using the Capture > Depth option for snapshots. To illustrate, here's a normal shot looking down at Tussock from about 500m:

here's the raw depth image:

and here's the autobalanced version of that:

showing that there's real depth data buried in there, and indeed that dark stuff is higher terrain and tops of builds (i.e., nearer the cam) than the light stuff.

Even with a bot, though, it would be an enormous amount of work.

[Rowan Amore]

20 hours ago, animats said:

Second Life Grid Survey will show you an image of each sim from above, with or without objects on it. This is the same data as the Second Life map. No elevation data, though.

Ahern, the terrain map. Without, and with, the object overlay. Yes, ads will show up in the object overlay, just like in the SL map. Textures are 256x256, so this is too low-rez to create a new region. The map is not the territory.

I once wanted the elevation data for regions, so I could make a map of SL like Google Earth. You're allowed to take pictures in SL, and access the map tiles, so that should be OK. With no elevation data, I had to settle for making a slippy map of SL - you can pan and tilt and zoom and fly over, but it's still a flat map.

Here and there in SL, people have made tabletop maps with this data. There's one at the Zindra Help Vortex, way out of date.

I've been interested in this data for a possible viewer feature to show low-rez impostors of sims outside the draw range. The goal is to get the look of a huge draw distance without slowing everything down. Nice for sailing and flying - you could see where you're going.

Is she asking about the raw terrain textures or just the land texture.  2 different things.  

[animats]

9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

...showing that there's real depth data buried in there, and indeed that dark stuff is higher terrain and tops of builds (i.e., nearer the cam) than the light stuff.

Even with a bot, though, it would be an enormous amount of work.

That's useful. I didn't know you could get a depth image out. I might try it out on some small part of the mainland, like the Snowlands of Sansara. Maybe make a relief map. It would be nice to see the mountains in the distance.

Is there some way to take an orthographic picture? No perspective? That's equivalent to backing off an infinite distance and zooming in. There's no obvious camera setting for that. OpenGL can do it, but it would be easier to not have to dig into a viewer. Also, I'd like to get pictures taken from below the advertising and sky junk level.

(Orthographic pictures are what you want for making impostors in general. If you want to impostor the four walls of a house, you need orthographic pictures to get the seams to match.)