custom islands: thoughts

Greetings,

i'm currently in the process of learning how to create valid (read: decent) .raw files for custom estate (private island) use. but i have a few questions i thought the community may be able to help with.

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as there is no real precedent for this sort of venture, i was wodnering a few hypotheticals..

1) how long do you think would be a decent amount of time for delivering a finished .raw file from the "go ahead" point (i.e., special requirements/design ideas/etc to be settled)?

2) how much would you (in the role of "private sim owner" believe such a service to be worth, on a per-sim basis? (in $US, $L or both)

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also, does anyone have any suggestions for a free (and easy?) program to use to do a quick render to get a feel for how any given .raw file would look once used in SL?


thank you in advance for any helpful insight anyone can provide.

Off the top of my head, you might consider Terragen.

I doubt it would handle the raw file directly -- not much would; as I understand it, the specific format is peculiar to SL -- and it does have a bit of complexity (though you can ignore much of that).

I thought the *.raw files were just greyscale bitmaps for height information only. Can't they just be painted by hand?

Dyne, thanks and it appears you're right.. i haven't run across any mention of .raw on their site, but i sure wouldn't mind seeing landscapes like that in SL!!

and you're right, only 3 channels of the 13 used are trhe really important ones. but i'm planning on taking all 13 into consideration for my end products.
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Dianne, yes.. they can be painted by hand.. which is exactly what i'll be doing. however, there are 13 "channels" to be considered when making a .raw file.. although most of them are for "safe/unsafe", "fly/no fly", "script/no script", etc..

two are back up channels..

the hardest part is combining the first two channels, which can be used to manipulate maximum land height either to lower or higher specs.

Looking at the docs on the raw files

Yup. Terragen would only really be useful for rendering/editing the terrain itself, so you would export the RAW file's red layer to some format that Terragen accepts.

Min and max terrain height, as well as the water level can be set in Terragen itself, so you don't need layers 2 or 3.

Layers 12 and 13 are the same as 1 and 2.

All the other layers (parcelling, fly zones, scripts, etc.) would be useless for "seeing how it would look", but if you wanted to get a sense of how they interacted with the landscape, you could probably export them to colored textures and overlay them on the landscape. Offhand, I can't remember how easily Terragen lets you do that.

Note that Terragen has terrain sculpting tools if you want to play with those.

Dyne, sounds like what i did with the Carrera 5 demo i tried out just after my last reply in this thread. i simply made a single layer .jpg that was used instead of the .raw file.. a slight workaround, but it gave me an idea of the program and it wasn't the result i was looking for.

so, maybe i'll give TerraGen a try.. again. i believe i tried it out in late 2004 or something. somewhere around the time i posted an example i had made for a private island, which was subsequently made into a few different 3D versios, one even included a "fl-by" movie.

in any case, thanks for the suggestions.
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to everyone else, any other thoughts on my original post?

i'm lost on some of this as it's fairly new ground i'm treading and could use some community input. as could anyone else who wanted to pursue such an endeavor.

Just be careful with raws. The format LL uses for the RAW's are extremely lossy (at 128m, you will be losing up to a meter in height)

RAW's are a nice start to a sim, just to make sure things line up right on the edges; but you really need to 'finish it off' with a lot of manual cleaning up.

Terragen is useful indeed. But it's very much a "work in progress" application! The UI is awful! And the version I have only imports 257x257 .raw files ( 257 ? yep ! )

I do most of the work in a bigger ( 1024x1024) greyscale layer in photoshop and then scale down and export to raw for terragen it's very fiddly but it works. I made a useful action in photoshop to do that bit ! If I had any tips I think it would be Gaussian Blur is your freind !


Also you need to twiddle with the height range scale in terragen. I havn't had the chance to upload a file to SL yet but I've had good results from my experiments in terragen. When importing to SL I expect playing around with finding good values for the height scaling channel will be the key.

As for costing the service, if I were you I would charge for my RL time spent on the job, and it wouldn't be cheap ! This is a fiddly and skilled job, don't underprice yourself.

So far from my attempts and experimentation, I would say expect to take several hours work on each file. Obviously it depends on the complexity of the landscape.


this one is an experiment to create a spiral path, I imagine this would needs loads of hand tweaking when uploaded to SL. And the vertical cliffs might be problematic for SL's texturing system. Although I've had very good results with my rock textures on vertical land surfaces in SL.

One of the problems with Terragen is that you get static renderings of the island. To get around that, I'm writing a utility (using a standard 3D game tutorial set) that will allow a "flyaround" of a RAW file in 3D. I'll post when the project is further along.