Texturing of land

I own a parcel of land. Is there anyway to change it's texture or color?

Or is this only available if you own the SIM.

Thanks

It is only available to private estate owners and people they give that ability to. It can't be done on mainland even if you own the entire region.

True.

You can make changes in some Mainland sims by raising or lowering the land, though. (You can get 'more sand' or 'more grass' or such. But that's true only in certain places.)

There is no parcel-level terrain texture control.

At the sim level, a private island sim owner or their estate manager can change the sim's terrain textures, but it changes it sim-wide. Everything at certain elevations shares the same sim textures.

On the mainland, you can never change the terrain texture. Not even if you own every parcel in the sim.

If you want to change terrain appearance in just one parcel, you'll have to cover the ground with prims, textured like terrain. OK for a flat lawn, not very convincing for natural-looking terrain.

I wonder why such a restriction? They should at least allow color change.

Also how do I tell if my parcel's SIM is on mainland? Any flags?

It's to do with how terrain texture is rendered - I believe it's a fractal-type algorithm (but I'm not sure).



Choose World -> Region/Estate -> Covenant. If the Estate Owner is "Governor Linden", you're on mainland.

Terrain texturing in SL is designed to be efficent for rendering, and less to be aestheticly pleasing at the parcel level.

Terrain textures need to be 512 x 512 pixel 24-bit TGA files, and need to be seamlessly able to tile in both directions. These will map to a 12 M x 12M repeating grid, starting at the corner of the sim. (Depending on where the sim is in the world Grid, the NE starting corner will either start with a whole tile, 2/3 of a tile, or 1/3 of a tile in either direction.)

This is 12M x 12M in the X and Y directions only, regardless of how much change is there in the Z axis. The actual owner of the sim and the sim's designated Estate Managers can all change terrain texture choices, as explained below. Only the Owner can upload or download .raw files for terraforming with external tools.

In the estate controls there is a tab for "ground texture". There you can specify 4 terrain textures that will be used at various altitudes.

There are also two height values associated with the "texture elevation ranges" each corner of the sim. The low value is the maximum height in that corner for texture #1, and the high is the minimum height for texture #4. The midpoint between these two is the transition point between textures 2 and 3.

Think of these height settings as setting the shape of a plane that is stretched from corner to corner in the sim. If all 4 low values are equal, and all 4 high values are equal, then the dividing lines are level. If the West side values are lower than the East side, the plane slopes down on the West. Lower just one corner, and the plane dips in that direction, lowest at the corner.

Where it gets tricky is that the blending of the transitions is difficult to predict, and not something you directly control. You could set the transition point to 20 M, and a flat 22 M surface might still have blotches of texture #1 in it.

Example: Texture 1 = sand, Texture 2 = clumpy grass, texture 3 = grass, texture 4 = snow. Low set to 20. high to 95 in all corners. terrain heights vary from sea level (20 M) to 100 M. Results in sandy beaches, a mostly green island, and snow-capped peaks.

(For a more detailed discussion on how terrain textures map to a sim, look at this thread: /109/83/253726/1.html )