Terraforming gadgets needed?

There is so much I still don't know, not unlike real life.

I am trying to partially embed a garden path and I'm finding the built in terraforming tools are not precise enough to just barely overlap the path and not bury it and obscure the very close objects also partially embedded. It certainly is tedious - makes me just want to go clean house in real life instead.

I have seen terraforming gadgets on the market somewhere. Are these more precise than the tools in the edit / build window? Maybe I'm trying to exceed the limits of what is possible.

nope, the terraforming tools are as precise as it will get.

Full sim owners however can design the terrain in a much more precise way using heightmaps.

The key to subtle terraforming is using the tools gently - like any other skill in SL it takes practice. When doing a rolling edge like what you are looking for, use the mouse almost like a brush to feather the land back in around your edges. Brush towards your platform. The tool will take the level of the land where you FIRST click as the base height for things like flattening and smoothing. Expect it to take a bit to get the hang of when to let off the mouse button and when to use small clicks. The terraforming tools are kind of like a broadswoard in a lot of respects, you can do a lot of damage in a hurry if you aren't careful.

Perhaps using a sculpty to make an path of uneven height would be useful.

The terraforming tools now have a strength adjuster. Try setting the strength all the way to the left (less strong) and do the ground leveling. If that's not strong enough, move the lever slightly to the right, etc.

These replies have already helped me. I did not know how the "brush" chooses the first height it encounters as the base height, nor did I know about the strength feature though it was right in front of me.

The scultpies would look great, but I would need to use twice the prims if I want to walk on the path (using the sculpties as phantom and using solid invisible prims to walk on). Or have the sculpties changed their huge boundaries enough to walk on now? Either way, quite doable and would certainly solve the odd edge angles I'm encountering.

Thanks.

I set out a little free gizmo that does scripted terraforming, such as it is. There are lots of gadgets out there that do something terraforming-related, so I'm not sure this one is anything new, but it seemed useful when I played with it. It's free to buy or take a copy, at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shinsa/141/127/54.

To use it, shift-drag a few copies, and set them so the bottom surfaces are at the desired land heights, then click them a few times until the land forms that shape. You'll notice that they operate on a 2m x 2m resolution, so if they're closer together they'll "fight" each other's level.

Also, if you hold the mouse down, it will smooth at the existing land height under just that one, not affecting the others. (This just seemed like a handy feature when I was playing with them.)

There's nothing one can do with these things that one can't do with the terraforming tools, but it could be useful for some things, perhaps establishing a long slope with a continuous grade, for example.