Land / Ground texture

I need to get out more. I just visited the Flora sim for the first time to shop for plants. There's a beautiful texture on the ground all over the sim that is like huge cobblestones that gradually fade into a grass texture and then fade back in another area. It seems to be vaguely based on elevation, but I can't really tell. It's not very realistic, but still beautiful.

It never occurred to me to change ground textures. I'd love to get away from the sand and pitiful scruffy grass of my humble plot. Are we allowed to do that? And is it based on elevation? I don't see options for it in the landscaping tools. Are there landscaping tutorials out there somewhere? Thanks.
-- KC

Only private island sims have the ability to change ground textures, unfortunately.

What I hear is that ground textures are all one texture but are filtered by their height value!

If thats true, its very clever.

I think it is true after looking at other sims where some hills are allowed. Clever too. It looks like only the owner of our island can change it, and most of the residents are into their beaches, scruffy grass and all. Makes me want to buy an island, just not with real $. One can dream though. -- KC

To be precise, a private sim owner or their Estate Managers can select a set of 4 texture pairs for their sim terrain textures. Each pair is a 512 x 512 and a 128 x 128 version of the same seamless, tilable terrain texture - for example, clumpy grass and rock. The 4 textures are assigned to 4 height bands, from the lowest elevations to the highest. At each corner of the sim you define what alitude will be used for the transition from the lowest texture to one above that, and from the highest to the one below the highest. The division between the middle two textures splits the difference between those two defined values. SL then does its own blending to create the sim terrain, and there is a several meter high blend zone at each transition level. This sometimes gets the mottled effect the original poster described. (Prim cobblestones embedded in rough terrain might also be how it was done, in the cited case.)

There is VERY little fine control over the texture blending effect. You could, for example, use white sand for the lowest texture and rough rock for the next one up. By having a low limit of 22 in one corner fo the sim and 10 in the other three, you could make one corner have sandy beaches, while the other three have rocky coastlines. In the rocky coastline areas the sand is all under water.

The textures can be any appropriately sized 240-bit textures in your inventory or from the Library. The high rez one has whatever name you want, and the low-rez variant has the same name with " Base" appended to it - "White Sand" and "White Sand Base", for example.

There is no parcel-level control of terrain texture. It's sim-wide.