SIM Terrain Textures

We "own" land in an estate. The setting is really beautiful, with mountains and trees and canals. The one thing that detracts from the beauty is the awful appearance of textures. The mountain tops look fine, either up close or from a distance, but most of the green textures (sides of mountains and grass) look horrible. They get more and more blurred as they get closer to ground level, which is not good since that is the area we see the most.

We talked to the SIM owner and he said there isn't anything that can be done since it's an SL thing. Apparently, because all the mountains sink below water level, the texture must be stretched too far, which causes the blur. I don't necessarily see why this would also affect the grass on the ground.

We don't have terraforming rights without permission (and supervision), so we can't play around and try things.

I have uploaded some images. He said that there is only one set of allowable textures for the entire SIM, so each parcel cannot have different textures. I actually understand this, since an estate owner wants to preserve the consistent appearance of the SIM and prevent some people from putting down purple grass and blue mountains.

Maybe some experienced terraformers or SIM designers can offer some advice that we can pass along to our SIM owner.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Dmitriy

1. Mountain side

2. Right side of waterfall and mountain side further right

3. Ground texture

You can change the default textures for a sim. They need to be a certain setting, I can't remember off the top of my head what it is but it can be changed, 32 bit or something I seem to recall. I changed mine so I know it can be done.

He's right about the textures per sim, they are set by height of the land as I recall. There are four settings for this so you can have four different textures.

Yes, the four terrain textures are limited to 512x512 24-bit tga. Not sure how much area each texture tile covers, but I just put some high quality textures in my sim textures, and did not see any improvement over the photos you posted. Unless LL reduces the area each 512x512 is applied to, or allows higher resolution textures, that is about as good as it gets.

You can make it look nicer on your own, by applying textures to prims and covering the land, but of course, that adds to you prims and increases the difficulty if getting nice terraforming other than flat...

Each sim has 4 texture 'slots' available to it. These can have different or the same textures, which must conform to the required standard, I think that is 24bit, 512x512.

These textures are height related and blended automatically as the terrain height changes.

The sim owner can specify what the lower and upper limts are for the blending of the first and last textures, but has no say over what happens in between.

The sim owner can however change the lower and upper limits for blending purposes in each of the 4 quadrants of the sim, north-west, north-east, south-west and south-east.

Even with playing with the settings and also terraforming the land there is still some element of randomness involved in the blending process, which is a good thing I suppose.

I only know this because I spent a full day earlier this week trying to get snow on the ground in just one corner of my sim. It is possible, but it is fiddly.

Regards,
Beady Voom

What Beady said ^ , also..

The blurring occurs because the textures tile the x,y plane instead of tiling at a tangent to the slope of the land; the 'steeper' the land, the higher the surface area that the textures are stretched over. The only way you can reduce the blurring is by reducing the 'steepness' of the land.

The other thing you could try is using a texure with less detail; it's the detail of the texture that we see being stretched. At an extreme a completely plain texture, although stretched in the same way, would show no blurring at all.

I want to see if I understand the 4 texture slots part. The mountain walls are about 50m high. I can't tell if the texture being used is one texture (brown on top like mountain stone and greener as it goes down to convey grass) or if the mountain has more than 1 texture. But with the 4 texture slots, does that mean the top third of the mountain, say for about 16 meters can be one texture, then another for the next 3rd, and a different one for the lower third. That would leave the 4th slot for the floor grass. Or have I misunderstood the location of these quadrants? If it can be done this way, or even 2 on the mountain, it might appear less blurred.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is what the estate terrain settings looks like: