Applying textures to mainland?

OK...so the answer is probably "You can't"

Has anyone got any tips or workarounds that they've seen work?

I'd like to turn some sand into grass if i could.

/me goes looking for a box of virtual grass seed

"You can't" is the correct response, all right. No one can re-texture the terrain in a mainland sim - not even estate owners that own every square meter of a sim on the mainland.

Your only option for appearing to change the ground textures on a mainland parcel is to cover the actual ground with testured prims. One possibility that has only recently become available is that you could model several sculpted prims to exactly match the current terrain surface. Then texture those, make them phantom, and place them just barely above the actual terrain surface.

Before you ask, no, I don't know how to make that sort of sculpted prim. But I know it can be done. I've seen the trick demonstrated for me by someone else. So maybe someone more experienced in making planar-type sculpties can step up and explain how that is done?

Thanks Ceera - thought as much

Sculpties are a bit of a closed book to me...so unless I'm making a grass tennis court or a formal lawn, I'm a bit stuck !

I did one normal prim beach once. Used flattened cylinders and spheres for most of the surfaces, to get away from that tennis-court-lawn look. You can apply the same terrain textures to prims that you use for real terrain. As I recall, on real terrain a 512 x 512 texture tiles to 12 M squares, so you'd want to set your repeat factor on your prims to a similar level. Good luck!

I made some sand islands just off-shore from my land doing the same thing with flattened spheres and the generic sand tex...came out not too bad, but they're more or less level.

This is steeply climbing, and uneven ground - by design, before anyone says 'flatten it'