One terrain Texture painted for the full SIM

i just search for any glitch or hint or way around too make it possible.
Does some one know a way to prevent the tiled texture for a Sim and paint one custom one for the complet SIM ?
One that covers shadows ,roads ,erosion ect instead of loading 4 Textures 512x512 one bigger or 4 that cover the 4 parts of the Sim.
Thanks for pointing my Nose in the right direction.
and not possible don't count

Cover the whole sim with a sculpted 256x256x256 phantom megaprim that matches the ground surface, but a few cm above it, with a 1024x1024 detailed ground texture.

You'll probably need to go with multiple megaprims, actually. 1024x1024 would leave each pixel 25cm across.

That's pretty much the only workable approach, anyway.

I've wanted to try something like this ever since seeing the first Sim terrain to sculpty tools. Would really add an amazing amount of detail to a sim for just a few prims. The existing sim terrain texture blending system actually works pretty well, but not enough control to really create a full-on custom terrain.

I wonder if you could get the shapes to match close enough so that you weren't ankle deep in the terrain all the time. Just might have to give this a try, maybe start with a section of a sim to see if it is feasible.

*** Absolutely impossible with textures on the real terrain. ***

While it is technically possible to form a thin shell of sculpties over the surface, and to use enough of them to get a decent resolution, I think you would still be grossly dissatisfied with the results. Not only would it be impossible to freely terraform the sim after the shell was in place, but any surfaces that were streached vertically will still be distorted on the textured prim surface.

Actually, that's an advantage to the prim surface... you can "anneal" it to make the mesh more even in places like that.

Not necessarily. It depends on how many sculpties you want to invest, and on how well you texture them. Remember, you don't necessarily need to spread them evenly across the 2D land grid like you do with the regular ground texture repeats. If you've got a vertical rise of 30 meters, you could invest three 10x10 sculpted planes into just the rise alone, without necessarily doing any horizontal spread at all.

Further, you don't need to spread the vertices within a single sculpt evenly either. If an area has an extra degree of stretch in any dimension(s), you can move more vertices into that area to give the entire mesh a more even look.

So it's certainly doable, from that perspective. But of course, there are some rather serious additional downsides:

1. LOD would be a huge problem, on both the sculpties and the terrain mesh. Both are very sensitive to viewing distance, and terrain is especially sensitive to camera angle. I'm not sure it's possible to make the sculpties and the land sync from all angles and all distances. One would likely poke through the other, and vice versa, as the camera moves around.

A better solution would probably be to flatten the actual land, and drop it to zero, and then build a transparent collision mesh out of regular prims to approximate the shape of the sculpty land. That way there can be no conflict whatsoever between the sculpt meshes and the land mesh.

2. Poly counts would be nutty. Each sculpted "tile" will have 2048 triangles in it, and if you want decent texture resolution, you'd probably want to go with a minimum of something like a 16x16 grid of 16x16M mega sculpts. That comes out to well over half a million polygons, before you even get to the other stuff in the sim.

3. The texture load would be tremendous. If we go with the above numbers, and put a 1024x1024 on each tile, we're talking a total of 768MB of texture memory (256 textures times 3MB for each one). That's the full memory capacity of an entire 8800GTX right there. To paraphrase C3PO, "Your computer would learn a new definition of pain and suffering as memory and processing power are slowly digested over a thousand years, which is about the amount of time it would take to render each frame." Seriously, even high end gaming PC's would be brought to a standstill.

4. Your beautifully sculpted, exquisitely textured terrain that you worked so hard to build wouldn't have your name on it as the creator. Maybe not everyone cares about this, but I'm sure at least SOME do. Since megaprims can't be created at will, we all have to use the existing ones that were created by the small handful of people who knew how to make them when the loopholes were open, so anything you build out of them looks like it was made by those people. That's the biggest reason I hate using megaprims. I do get business from people who have seen my work in-world, as I'm sure do others. When people can't tell who really made what, it's a problem. (Of course, you can get around the problem by linking the megaprims to a regular prim you've made, so maybe the point is moot, since you'd need to build that transparent collision lattice anyway.)


What I really wish were allowed were simply he application of larger terrain textures. Right now we repeat 512x512's every 12 meters, right? How about allowing the repetition of a 1024x1024 every 24 meters? The total memory load would be exactly the same, but there'd at least be room to diversify a bit. It wouldn't be a perfect solution by any means, but it wouldn't be an insignificant improvement either.