Trying to create prim land, with natural shoreline

Hi,

I recently came up with an idea. I want snow on my land. But it's only half a sim. For various reasons, the entire sim's land textures are not going to be changed to snow.

So, I thought about putting snow-textured prims down, that I could also change with the seasons. Let the leaves pile up on it in the fall, etc.

I further thought I'd build underwater things underneath the "land" so that merfolk can have nice places to play as well, without having to just turn it all into water.

Now the problem is, I can terraform it if I was not making some of the land prim land, and have nice somewhat natural looking edges around lakes and rivers, but then I couldn't build anything below it that the merfolk could swim to from the lake, for example. But if I build the land as prims, regular shapes are too regular. For example hollowing a cube with a round shape for the hollowing, and then using path cuts? Comes out far too regular.

So what's the best method to create an irregular shoreline? Use sculpties and hope that it doesn't create too much loading time?

You probably know - the trouble with scultpies is their boundaries are not where they appear so you would be walking on air for much of the shoreline. If you have the prims to spare you can get around it by making the sculpties phantom and putting invisible regular prims in roughly the same place for people to walk on / collide with. That usually looks great though.

I wonder how water reacts to sculptie edges. Windlight water ripples actually bounce off the edge of my screen which I find very weird, so maybe they do great with sculpties,

It actually depends on what program you are using to create your sculpties. I use AC3D which allows me to make sculpties which do not have the huge bounding box around them.