New Island Need Help

Helping a friend here...he has a new Island...didn't know it would be blank. I have mainland and been here awhile and can terraform but no experience on estates. Sooo....in the easiest possible path of resistance, can anyone tell me the steps to make this look more then nothingness? Newbie guide please! LOL

I assume from what I read slap in four ground textures at the various hight levels so you have a visual reference...then start terra forming from a flat sim either up or down?

Can different quads be different textures...ie. mountainous green in one NE quad SE quad be flat sand? Going from river to sand...middle easternish look around the nile into the desert.

Thanks All!

There are a lot of people who can offer you terramaps and places where you can buy some. But you'll probably have more fun laying it out yourself.



True. My friend and I just finished a sim that was completely wiped out and a flat surface. We have mountains and sand, but it was basically as you said.



Sure, why not? But one thing you'll quickly discover is that a single sim with mountains gets very small, very fast.

Have fun with it. We drafted ours out on graph paper to start and worked out as many of the details as we could before we actually started terraforming. Might consider that

Good luck!

I'm assuming your friend acquired the land from someone else or is renting it. If they actually OWN the island, I have the four original RAW files that LL uses for brand new islands. I can provide them by email if your friend is interested. (Will have to wait until I'm home tonight though.)

You just upload the RAW file using the Terrain tab of the Region Tools. The only person who is able to upload a terrain file is the island owner (the one whose name is on the Covenant tab of about land). Not even estate managers can do it.

Anyway, just IM me in-world with an email address if you'd like the Linden island templates.

Well, yes and no. There is no way to directly say: "Use this texture in one corner and that texture in another."

The textures you set apply to the entire sim, and you can only adjust, at a very high level, the elevation range where the 4 different strata layer.

For example, last night I terraformed a sim where the Southern half was sandy and the Northern half was grassy at the same elevation. I am only using 2 terrain textures (the top 3 slots all use the same grassy texture). I achieved the grass-to-sand transition by setting the maximum elevation of texture 1 (sand) to 10 in the NW and NE corners, which basically pushes the sand layer underwater. I left the max height for texture 1 alone in the SW and SE corners, meaning the sand layer comes out of the water and just barely blends with the grass layer.

It is very tough to explain... best thing you can do is experiment. Just keep in mind that the Terrain tab is very misleading because the 4 textures are positioned over the 4 corner-height controls. A lot of people think this means the controls adjust height ranges for the texture directly above them, when in fact you're just setting the start and end heights of the blend range for all textures in that corner of the sim.

SL evenly divides the strata within that range for the given corner of the sim.

Thanks Wildefire ! I assume those are the .raw files I found on the knowledge base site? Just have him (yes, he owns the island pays direct tier to LL) upload one of those .raw files from LL knowledge base then terraform and retexture the terrain as we wish from the original .raw file? Sorry, I am completely new to this and no nothing about .raw files and damn little about photoshop.

Yeah, I don't know what's at the knowledgebase (do you have a link to that article?) but I imagine they'd be the same ones. (I got my copies by downloading the raws of different islands I purchased.)

The raw file can contain a lot of crazy stuff (which you won't have to worry about if you just upload the LL template files), but it does not include anything about the land textures. That's totally defined in the Land Textures tab (or whatever it's called). Check the second post I made in this thread for tips about texturing.

But yeah, start by uploading the raw and then tweak the terrain from there. Once everything's shaped the way you like it, I recommend using the Bake Terrain function, which will save the current terrain into the backup layer, which is used by the Revert Land feature. Then download the terrain into a new RAW file as a backup.