Terraforming guides?

Are there any good tutorials on terraforming? I just seem to make a mess out of my land.

Idunna, I asked this a while back, and the response I got was, "just play around with the Land tools". That seemed awfully vague, but it actually worked out pretty well.

What exactly is it that you want to do?

I'm basically just trying not to mess things up. I was under the impression you could permanently damage land.

I'm just trying to smoothe out the edges of my land where it was chopped up for sale originally.

You can royally mess up the land with the tools.. BUT only temporarally.. however sometimes you have to revert the land or smooth land to sort out problems.

Sounds like you want to use the select option to select a long strip of land then use the smooth option.

You cannot 'damage' land, however you can mess up the terraforming and there isn't really an 'undo' option. The 'revert land' function does not 'undo' your recent changes, it reverts the land to the original state if you're on mainland. (On a private island it returns the land to the last baked level which is sort of the same thing).

If you want to just flatten some areas, you can select the land you want - it is selected in chunks of 4x4 meters - then select the flatten tool, then apply to selection.

Editing terrain is not an exact science...in my experience it is kind of wierd, and when you 'press down' on one bit it seems to 'pull up' somewhere else. I believe there really isn't any better way to learn a feel for the tools, than to play with them.

In order to get a desired final result I often use a number of different tools, and sometimes I'm applying them to a selection, other times I'm using them directly with the small, medium, or large selector. And frequently I have to try more than once, to get things just perfect.

I'd suggest playing around with it, don't panic, and if things go wrong and look wierd (don't panic) just try a different tool. The smooth tool and the flatten tool can help erase some wierd results.

-Atashi

Terraforming land is very tricky, and like any skill practice makes perfect.

there are a few good tool out there and for basic terraforming.
my favorite is -Spanks Specialties- "Land Bot" ( the editing tool, not the land thief)

For a Basic land leveler or flattener just drop the below script into a prim and move it around with the editing tool, it saves alot of time over trying to it freehand...

It's very much a case of trial and error, I have found. The tools behave ... oddly at times to say the least. Also, I have found that "less is more" when it comes to using these tools.

Is there a terraforming sandbox anywhere, so I could practice before ruining my parcel?

And be very very careful. After I had terraformed my plot, I decided to dig out underneath the house for an underwater grotto. Was under there working, got finished, surveyed my work, smiling in smug satisfaction at the wonderful job I'd just done, and went back upstairs to find that the average level of the rest of the plot seemed to have risen (that is where all the dirt I excavated went!) and buried everything...all I could see were the tops of the trees and the tip of the beach umbrella.....

If all you want to do is smooth out the edges so that all the little ex-parcels make one nice big smooth parcel, try setting the 'select' tool to 'small', then push the 'smooth' button. You can work on a little bit at a time, making sure that all the little dots on the tool cover the area evenly. It won't change anything dramatically, but will even out the rough edges. Try a little bit, then move on to a next portion, do that a little bit, and then eventually you'll have done the whole thing. You can also try playing with different sized tools, but for the starting stages, I'd use the smallest until you feel comfortable watching what it does.

Don't let these posts make you even more nervous...

The first time I tried the Land tools and the ground started rippling under my cursor, I got scared and put the thing away for days.

Then I screwed up my courage, and tried again. And I found that it really IS pretty easy. Oh, sure, I wound up fiddling with little bits here and there for days, tweaking them to get them "just right". But the basic terraforming was all done in an hour or so.

My island started out as a flat rectangle. I began with the large size brush and the Raise Land tool, and pulled up a nice little mountain on one corner. Just kept Raising the land until it was as high as it could go.

Then I used the Smooth tool to knock down the sharp edges.

Then I turned my attention to the seashore. I used Lower and Flatten to make a little beach area, and then walked the perimeter of the parcel underwater, using the Flatten tool to make a more attractive seabed.

Then, I went back to the mountain and worked on creating a plateau about halfway up. Once I had that, I carved out a notch in the side of the mountain, and a streambed in the plateau, for a waterfall that would stretch from the mountaintop, meander as a creek along the plateau, then plunge into a small bay.

As things progressed, I switched from using the Large brush to the medium and finally the small brush, to deal with smaller and smaller details and finer changes.

The trickiest bits come when you've placed objects on and in the land. I had to fiddle with the land around my dock for quite a while to get it where it didn't leave a big gap between the pier and the ground, and also didn't have dirt surging up and covering the walkway. I found that Smooth was the tool to avoid when working around edges like this. Raise, Lower, and Flatten, used in a sort of iterative progression, produced the best results.

I'm quite an amateur terraformer, but I'm pleased with my first project. If you'd like to see it, take a look at FairChang Brisas, in the northwest corner of the sim. If a newbie like me can do it, you can too!

Is the terraforming tool "intelligent" enough to only effect one lot? My worry has been some how messing up my neighbor's lot. (I bet you hadn't guessed that I'm new at this.)

Yes. It won't affect your neighbor's lot at all, unless your neighbor was silly enough to 'allow anyone to edit terrain' in his 'about land' window. You can double check this by right clicking on HIS land and looking at the 'options' tab. If he has allowed this, you might want to IM him and let him know, otherwise anybody could come along and mess with his terraforming.

You can *slightly* affect a neighbor's land when you are editing your own terrain. I can't remember if there's a formula (east / west, north/south) but if you for instance raise your whole lot to the maximum height, on one side the sharp slope will be on your lot and on the other side the sharp slope will be on your neighbor's lot. About 1/2 meter's worth of the neighbor's land can get pulled up (or down, if you're lowering your land a lot) into a slope.

It wouldn't really affect the neighbor unless they'd built right up to the very edge.

-Atashi

Yes, there is.

Hmmm... couldn't find the old terraforming sandbox - did it go away?

This doesn't mean anything to me. What sharp edges? How did they get there?


Flatten makes it attractive?

How do you keep Flatten from raising the seabed above water level?


Will do.

But here's the thing: You've gotten enough of an intuitive feel to be able to accomplish what you wanted, but not enough to explain it clearly to others. You've said what tools you've used, what your design is like, but you haven't really said what you did, or what the tools do.

I don't mean to pick on you, though. As near as I can tell, no one else has, either.

You can practise terraforming on my 1.5K block in the south east corner of Explorers Rangeland. Being on a pi, you can go up to 100 M.

I do beaches by setting a parallel strip to the lowest level at the edge of the sim (the furtherest part under water), setting another strip to the highest leve at the highest part of the beach, and then applying the smooth setting to the whole lot. You may need to repeat a couple of times.

Ed

I haven't seen a great, detailed, "applied" guide to the tools really that is very useful ... I think it's the nature of the beast that this is something that requires practice to get a feel for the tools more than anything else.

When I had my 512m lot there was nowhere to build except right to the edge. I logged in one day and my neighbor had raised all his land to max height. The land was visible inside my house and I couldn't see out the windows. I'm sure he didnt mean to do that, but I was a bit upset. I did "fix" it by lowering the land on my side as much as I could... no more land inside the house, but I still couldn't see out the windows.

I'm an amateur too, I was just as scared as you to try doing any of this and then one day I just decided it was time to give it a try. Maybe I can explain it a little.

I think the sharp edges being referred to are from raising or lowering the land in any given spot. When you have an area that differs in height dramatically, you'll want to use the smooth tool to "taper" it down so the the land flows like a hill or mound or whatever. I usually start at the highest point and smooth away from it slowly and then start at the high point again and do another strip. Its kind of like the motion of steam cleaning a rug as an example. Smoothing will lower some of the land at the edge to some degree if you start at the high point and work towards the low.

The flatten tool has a misleading name. What flatten does is make the land even... could make it higher, could make it lower depending on your starting point. Pick the spot at the land level you desire and work outwards from there with the flatten tool. Then taper it with a smoothing tool for fine tuning it.

When Lindal spoke of flattening the sea bed... you have to lower the land to get the water to rise, but it doesn't always lower evenly. Then you find the low point that you want and sweep along with the flatten tool to make it all the same depth. But, this may require you to smooth your shoreline a bit afterwards so that you don't have a huge drop off into the water unless you don't mind that sort of thing..

Being a beginner, I found that I had to play back and forth with the flatten and smooth tools near my shorelines until I got the look that I wanted. I'm sure an expert could have done it much more efficiently.

What seems to happen is this: whichever change you've selected to make is made in your selected area. Then, HALF that change is applied to the immediately surrounding terrain squares. Then, some general really complicated formula is run to smooth the entire region, possibly altering your neighbours' land as well. I did actually once ask the Lindens if they would tell us exactly what the formula was, but they said it was too complex

Between my boyfriend and I, we rent three full lots and several pieces of prim land so we border several neighbors and ourselves in some cases. I just never made any major raise or lower moves near the borders. I just started at the property line of the neighbor and smoothed or flattened outwards, trying to make it as seamless as possible. There always seems to be a fine line where you can see where the property line is. Of course it helps if you have a cooperative neighbor and you can work together to get a nice effect.

Ray's three rules of terraforming:

1) Use the "apply to selection" button very judiciously.

2) Want flat? First raise as high as it will go and then flatten.

3) Smooth is your friend.

Kidd, I'm sorry that I couldn't manage to be clearer. As others said, once you actually use the tools, some of the things I said will make more sense.

The "sharp edges" come about when using Raise and Lower. At least they do for me. If your brush rests for just an instant longer in one place than another, you'll get a jagged little peak or valley. Smooth will knock down these unsightly bumps.

Flatten also levels out these irregularities, but in a somewhat different way. After I got done lowering the seabed beyond my beach, it was all hills and valleys. So I used Flatten to make a level sandy surface, more suitable for wading, and in the deeper areas, for planting corals and sea grasses.

In terms of skill and aesthetics, that's absolutely true.

But somewhere along the way, some programmer had to decide what to do when the user does something with these tools. Hopefully that decision makes sense and is useful. But if that programmer isn't capable of explaining what the tool does, then that programmer has no way of knowing whether or not the code does what it's supposed to do, the testers have no way of testing it, and the users are forced to struggle to figure it out.