Alter Terrain Graphic

This was mentioned as a hijack in another thread, and I notice it didn't take root (of course, because it was a hijacked idea)... anyway, so I'm gonna restart this, and see if people go googly over it or if this is just a incomprehendable idea.

I really, really would love to see a "change terrain graphic" terraform feature. The whole world is so green, despite it being winter, and people are using flat-edged cube prims textured as snow to create a kind of flat snowy ground... and it just doesn't look right. If we had a kind of "spraypaint the ground" option with types of terrain shades (sand, for example, or snow, or even stone) we could ad a plethora of new options for building. For example: a pyramid that's on sandy ground, igloos and ice castles on snow, a desolate cathedral on rocky grounds, cemetaries on dead grass, or maybe we could even make our first swamp, complete with thick black mud all around. It'd be so cool.

I imagine there are a few things that instantly would make this a problem. Number one would be implementation--I don't know much or anything about the actual program of Second Life to know if this feature is at all possible. Second, I'd imagine some peoples' creativity would result in desert next to snowy plains--though don't we have similar contrasts like these in SL, anyway?

Okay, your turn. Comments, suggestions?

Dude I was thinking about this yesterday. There's a small portion on my land where I want it to be green and grassy and not sandy. I certainly don't want to make the land flat and use a flat cube with grass textures to try to get the look I want. Those flat cubes don't look very nice.

A "spray paint" option would be great.

This has been considered by Lindens as I've heard, it might even be in 3.0 along with other terrain features(correct me if I'm wrong). Also, if you don't know, height effects the ground texture.


The terrain spraypaint feature:

How I think this should work...

1) You could download Linden-made ground textures(if it were possible to use your own texture you might see a ground textures with balloons, that would be a mess ).

2) You could make a proposal to the lindens for a certain ground textures(IE, ask for a mars rocky texture).

3) Making the ground texture would be like painting in PS, you'd use a round, beveled brush to paint on the ground so it isn't blocky.

Ooo I like the spraypaint idea, and the edges of the spray could be alphad so its a gradual effect and not a "Wham theres sand" effect.

You could click "Spray Paint" and get a little tool which you then click and drag over the area and then the Texture is instantly painted on with its gradual alphad edges to blend properly.

I would agree that textures should be Linden approved so we don't end up with some ugly grounds.

Another idea is to have it so you can select small squares of your property and then select a texture from a drop down to apply to that square, the edges of the square would be alphad so it has a gradual effect also.

And/or you could do both!

You could have a Spray Paint option for more detailed work, and then have a Selective Application for larger work (when you want to retexture a large ammount of land in a short time), that way you could quickly select and drag over a large are and alot of squares and then retexture them all at once.

I think the alphaing of the edges to produce a gradual blend would solve any "patch-work" looking problems.

Another cool idea...

Allowing a second layer of terrain graphic.

For Example...

Let's say you live on a grassy plain. It's winter, not too winterish right? Well, we could make it winterish by adding a second, alphad, layer of terrain texture. you could adjust the alpha of it too.

You would get an effect with icey like grass like on those cold, winter, mornings.

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Any of youse ever seen Trainz? (http://www.auran.com)

It has a fantastic terrain editor, amongst other things. It's pretty similar in functionality to SL's land editing tools, though more of them and more advanced. One of these features is the spray painting of terrain as described here.
It actually doesnt require alpha'd areas at all. you can upload a tileable or non tileable texture, say rocks or desert or whatever and it intelligently blends them, as well as allowing some very clever scaling and stuff so it doesn't all look blocky and regular.

You can produce some truly awesome looking landscapes with it.

Before I found SL, I used to use Trainz purely as a sandbox for creating landscapes and populating them with model buildings and such.

Letsee... Technical issues. Right now the data that describes the landscape is probably stored as a grid of Z-values and and index to a owner table. (My guess, anyway.) The terrain texture is solely determined by the Z-value. (Near or below the waterline, sand -- top of mountains and above, tundra -- and the others between.)

There would have to be another couple bits added to each landscape vector point to describe it's texture. One value would be "default" based on the Z, the others would reference a short list of available textures.

Interface. Not knowing how different the new landscape editing tools will be, I can only guess as to how this could be implemented now. There would probably be a limited list of land textures, just as there is a limited list of bump-map textures. (I'd really like to be able to upload my own bump-map textures!) There is going to be a "Revert" too for landscape z-values, so I would imagine it would also revert the textures.

As for applying it, it would probably just be another tool selection like the raise/lower/level set we have now. Perhaps "texture" would be it's name and it would use the same brushes. There is already a blending between textures on the land, so the same thing would form the edges of an altered area.

So it would add to the data size of the landscape, but the interface can be identical to what we have now. I'd say it was doable, but we have to wait and see what v1.3's new tools are like. Who knows... Maybe the ability to re-texture is already there.

Has anyone looked around the new continent for bits of land that aren't textured based on their height?

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