Creating prim land with natural shoreline

Hi,

I recently came up with an idea. I want snow on my land. But it's only half a sim. For various reasons, the entire sim's land textures are not going to be changed to snow.

So, I thought about putting snow-textured prims down, that I could also change with the seasons. Let the leaves pile up on it in the fall, etc.

I further thought I'd build underwater things underneath the "land" so that merfolk can have nice places to play as well, without having to just turn it all into water.

Now the problem is, I can terraform it if I was not making some of the land prim land, and have nice somewhat natural looking edges around lakes and rivers, but then I couldn't build anything below it that the merfolk could swim to from the lake, for example. But if I build the land as prims, regular shapes are too regular. For example hollowing a cube with a round shape for the hollowing, and then using path cuts? Comes out far too regular.

So what's the best method to create an irregular shoreline? Use sculpties and hope that it doesn't create too much loading time?

Yes it looks like you have answered your own question. Sculpties would be your best option.

There are a number of ways of doing it. Here a few pics for examples.

This one is a height map I created in bryce and exported and used in blender to create a sculpt
map.



This is how it looked rendered in bryce.


Here is the same map inworld, it is stretched upward a bit.


And this is one I created in blender with out a height map and just the sculpt tools.



These are just a few images to show a couple different approaches.
Depending on your experience you may need to do a bit of study if you plan to do them yourself.

Good luck!

Note however that you can't walk on those sculpted surfaces. Their bounding box won't look anything remotely like the visual surface, so they need to be phantom, with some sort of prim aproximation of the surface just below the sculpted surface, so they can be walked on.

Oh yeah,

What Ceera said.

as far as i know, the hight map of a Second Life island has 256*256 vertices. Can i then recreate the exact island shape with a grid of 8*8 Sculpties ? And is it then correct, that i could in principle "Sculptform" an island of much finer structure when i use more sculpties ? (keeping LOD out of the way for a moment)


@Infiniview: Can you tell more about how you can transform a hightmap into a sculpt-map with blender ?

Yes, but again, as I said earlier, you will have issues with the fact that a sculpted prim's bounding box is not its surface. So that sculpted terrain won't be something you can walk on.

Making a terrain sculpty can be wonderful for capping an excavated area, to hide the pits and trenches needed to make caves. But you have to also include a rough approximation of that sculpted surface, made of normal prims, and make the sculpty itself phantom, if you want anyone to be able to walk across that sculpted area.

Also, the LOD issues will probably kill you. Would have to experiment with that, but large sculpties with lots of detail suffer pretty badly with distance.

I have something different in my mind: If it is possible to create a sculptie grid, that is modelled according to the terrain height map, then i have no problem at all. I simply can make the sculpties phantom, place them a few pixels "above ground level" and thats it. actually i walk on the terrain, but i see the sculpties. What would i gain? Well, the terrain can be texturised with much more detail: Automn leaves below trees, walk pathes directly placed as textures on the terrain, whatever is not possible with the standard terrain texturing tools...
And it comes to my mind, that avatars always seem to float above ground. One could raise the sculpties so that the floating effect gets compensated. Oh, and then you could simulate mud, fog on the ground(just some weird idea).

Only if it comes to creating caves and holes we would need invisible prims to simulate ground levels...

Yes, your trick would allow a more detailed and specific terrain texturing. But LOD differences will often make the actual terrain "poke through". You would have to experiment with it, a lot, to get it to work right.

To proceed with your idea, simply get a copy of the .RAW file for the sim, and slice it up as required for your sculpted "caps". I'm uncertain myself what the exact process is for converting that greyscale heightmap to the sculpt map, but I am sure someone else can chime in on that topic.