sim land mesh

Mesh level of a sim what detail has? I mean what would look like if I take the raw file and use as height map in 3dsmax for example what would I get? the same number of poligons or not how many poligons is a whole sim land ?

I'm sure someone can go into more detail. But I think you start with a 256 by 256 .raw file. Each pixel of that file represents one square meter. Then use grey scale for height.

There may be some way to force more terrain detail that I am not aware of. Anyone else got idears?

The poly count of the land mesh is dependent on your graphics settings, and your current point of view at any given moment. There's no fixed count. It's interpolated on the fly.

At highest LOD, I think the cap is two tris per square meter. At lowest LOD, if my measurements are correct, two tris equal 16 square meters. The actual poly count per square meter will be somewhere in between those numbers at all times, again depending on your settings and POV.

If you want to see the mesh for yourself, simply turn on wireframe view (ctrl-shift -R). You'll see the poly count change as you move your camera around.

On the RAW map, 1 pixel equals one square meter, as Alisha explained. There's no fixed amount of polygons per pixel. Meters are what are relevant, not polygons. That may sound a little strange, if you're coming from a more traditional 3D modeling background, but hey, that's just SL. Strange is its middle name.

As for using an SL terrain map as a height map in 3DS Max (or any other 3D modeling program), that can certainly be done. It won't have any direct benefit to you in SL, though, at least none that I can think of off hand.

One thing you can do is use the height map to generate the mesh in your modeling application and then tweak with the tools available there. You can then generate a new height map off of the adjusted mesh and load it into SL. Iterate as needed. Of course this assumes you have access to a sim you can play with like this (or an Open Sim server!).

Me personally
I do professional terrain creation

only one program actually made the creation of my terrains rather easy.

L3DT

its interface is a bit daunting but for a free program you can't argue it results

it can be programm to accept the 256x256 poly mesh of the sl terrain and then using the inbuilt tools create a spectacular island or terrain in 3D space

tools that are dedicated to one purpose like this to me are most useful

when your done you can export to a .bmp that is the height map

take the bmp into balliwick and edit as you see fit with the water and such and export to .raw

and there you are.

thats my workflow on making terrains
now my method of creating them i nthe programs

i normally in balliwick never mess with the multipler
only the water height because i normally pre-calculate every final detail before anything else.

its very important however to take the map you get from l3dt and use a small 2.0 gausian blur
this will smooth the edges out just enough so they are not all pixelated and blocky in the sim you import to.

if you try L3DT and have trouble let me know i'll gladly help you with the program

you imported inSL as a sculpt?or how ? my idea is to use the precise model in 3ds to model on it some details to add on terrain that so can follow better the surface like debris shades , texturing , dirty and so on .... possibly even cutting pieces of sculpts to do this , is tha possible and if so how?I think is important to get the actual precise highe3st lod for the terrain to model the sculpt after it....

I assume he generated a height map for the terrain as he explains you need to blur the output, export to raw, etc.

In Max you could use the Displace modifier with a bitmap input on a plane with 255 x 255 segments. It's not going to be perfect but It will get you a decent proxy to build off of.

Another, more extreme (and untested) method would create a 32 x32 array of 8m^2 (or whatever equivalent you prefer) plainer sculptie meshes. Then skin wrap them to the a plane set up as above and then turn on the displace modifier. The skin wrap will keep the array of meshes on the surface of the larger mesh as the Displace moves it to the new position. You can then use them as the starting point for your sculptie terrain.

I tried that but it didnt give good results the sculpt I got dont match the mesh ingame ....

No other way to do ?

No other way to do ?

For fun I once modeled a lot of SL in 3DSMax, you can see the results here:

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/Cartifex.htm

I applied a Displace modifier using a grayscale heightmap to Plane shapes, as Chosen Few mentioned. It works fine, as far as I can tell.

At least in my old version of Max (6) you can't use a raw file as a displacement map. But I suppose you could grab the height channel in photoshop or Gimp, or you can export the terrain channel as an image file from Bailiwick.

This might help you to visualize your terrain, but personally I don't know how you could go from there back to SL.

Although, now that I think about it, in theory it shouldn't be that hard to write a Max script that uses the vertex positions of a deformed plane to generate a grayscale heightmap bitmap. I wonder if Max has something like that built in.

I just used a ramp shader (black to white natch) with a side elevation uv projection and baked out a texture from the plane's UV space that I had on another channel.

Full workflow for setting up our company's sim landscape was - the initial concept was sketched out by the project lead and handed to me "the 3d technical guy" so I did the initial 3d mesh workup in Mudbox for the prof of concept. Once that was approved I brought that mesh into Max and rendered out the heightmap as above and passed it on to the lead to be uploaded so he could see it in engine. There were a couple more heightmap tweaks done right in Photoshop where the values were just painted in and then it was finalized and uploaded again. After that there was some minor land manipulation was handled with SL in engine tools.

I'm not saying this is the one true way to do anything, but it worked for us in the sense that we didn't have to spend lots of time terraforming in engine as the visualization details had been worked out beforehand.

I would do it differently today as Prim Composer, sculpties, and Open Sim were not available resources at the time.

Yeh but I dont want to make a whole sculpt of a sim land , but I want to do partial pieces to cover pieces of land exactly to make the shadows ....or add other details to my sim ....