Help with changing ground texture

I have just purchased a Homestead sim and am happy with it's shape but plan to change the ground texture.

I have found a thread that explains how to do this but I wanted to know more about the textures themselves.

I have seen some lovely flowery/foresty ground textures in SL sims.
- Are various textures available to all owners or do I buy them somewhere?
- If not, can I make and upload ground textures?
- Do ground textures need to be in a certain format and size?
- Most importantly, are there any helpful save or undo tips I should know of? As I am new to this I can imagine botching things totally and being stuck with a real mess!

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I think only one (the same as the sim as at set up, grass-sand- etc)


Yes you can upload your own terrain textures and textures to shape the terrain (RAW)



Jpg and PNG are the common formats. In power of 2, with this i mean for example 64*64 / 128 *128 etc


Yes you can rebake your terrain in the state manager menu.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Estate_Tools_test

Ground requires 512x512 targas, 24 bit.
All the LL ground textures are in your library.
You can see the ones in use and their various heights in the, oh, I think Estate Info or something like that.

A KB article on this is at
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Creating_Terrain_Textures

That will only work until 2012, according to the Maya.

As others said, the ground textures need to be 512 x 512 pixels, in 24-bit (non-alpha) format. It can be 24-bit TGA format (recommended), but jpg also works as does any other non-alpha texture format that you can import into SL.

A ground texture maps to a repeat factor of 1 repeat per 12 meters in the X and Y directions on the actual terrain, and needs to tile seamlessly to look uniform. Yes, this means at one edge of the sim it does 2/3 of a repeat. If you have three sims in a row East to West, the repeat tiles seamlessly, with one of the sims starting at the corner and the other two off by 1/3 or 2/3 of a tile as needed. You don't control that offset - it's based on sim grid position.

So for purposes of scale, if you divided your 512 x 512 texture into a 12 x 12 grid, each roughly 43 pixel by 43 pixel square in your texture would be 1 meter on a side when applied to the terrain. An handy thing to know when making a random scatter of flowers or seashells or other details in a terrain texture.

HOWEVER, ground texture salso streach vertically, with no additional content tiled in. That nmeans if over a 1M wide area the terrain rises in a 20 M high cliff, the terrain texture for that 1 M wide strip of land (if horizontal and level) of pixel data gets smeared across the 10M vertical face or the cliff.

It's best to use terrain textures that are fairly uniform, or where the repeat isn't obvious. A field of grass with a single large daisy in the middle would be extremely obvious as to the repeats, no matter how well the edge blended. The same grass with 20 randomly scattered daisies is a lot harder to see the pattern in.

The Library in your inventory has many common terrain textures that will do for most uses. But texture artists in SL have made a stunning array of better textures, such as mbetter looking beach sand with scattered sea shells, or grass with scattered wildflowers, that are well worth paying for.