help needed re texturing

I'm fairly new to SL and finding my way around quite nicely, however I'm having a little trouble getting to grips with the creative side of things. I recently acquired a plot of land on which to learn and practice my building skills, but it still just looks like a grey land scape. I'm guessing this may be because it hasn't fully rezzed, or ( most likely) there are no textures on the land. How do I go about applying texture to the land so that it looks like, say, grass or snow or water or whatever.

Any tips or suggestions would be gratefully received.

TR

Alas, you can't change the texture of the landscape. The land can be raised or lowered to create small hills or to flatten it out, but the texture depends on the region you bought land in. Some regions (sims) have a snowy ground, others offer green grass, some tropical regions look like sand.

What you can do though is covering the ground with large, flat prims and apply a texture of your choice to them. Create a box, set the size to 10 x 10 x 0.010 meters (10 meters = maximum size, 0.010 = as flat as possible) and look for a grass or other landscape texture. You should find some in your "Library" folder. Try, for example, "Library --> Textures --> Terrain Textures --> ...Default Set --> ...Grass". Then duplicate the prim a few times to cover all of your land (hold the shift key down while dragging the prim in order to duplicate it).

/Edit: In the "Objects" section of your Library folder you can find a variety of trees, plants, rocks, fence parts and other things to help with the landscaping.

You cannot texture mainland, that privilege is only extended to private Island owners.

However you can create prims and texture them to emulate grass, earth, water, snow etc. In addition textures exist to create almost anything else, as a basic prim is just that, with its behaviour modified by textures, scripts, and other additional prim characteristics (some of which are available via the create tool)

I suggest you visit a place called "The Tower Of Primitives" (do a search on it) to gain an understanding of prim handling.

The next step is textures. Linden Labs provide you with a few, but in general the vast majority of textures in Second Life are resident created.

On this point you have two choices. The first option is to create your own and upload them but you will need a separate software program such as Photoshop. Uploading texture files cost $L10 per file (individual textures) and each individual file must be configured in a certain way to allow the Second Life platform to understand it.

The second option is much more easy, but you will need to embrace the commercial aspect of Second Life, which is a very major part of the platform. That is you buy textures with either Linden dollars or real US dollars from another business within Second Life.

I think a good idea is to buy a box of textures, SL Exchange via the market place sells textures (and is one of many both in and outside SL) This option would start you off with nearly 4,000 textures for around $L 4,000. That’s about $14 real US and it is a very good deal imho. In fact by purchasing these you are accepting the fact other residents can profit from their work within Second Life and with that mindset you will be better placed to go forward with SL. I think you may find such a deal would provide you with almost all textures you will need. Remember almost everything you see in SL (apart from pure land) is a textured prim

Make sure any texture you purchase is full permissions (you can create and sell on anything made). Any texture that is not is worse than useless. (my suggestion above is full permission).

Note: you cannot sell the textures as textures alone, they have to part of any "build" as to breech this would infringe the intellectual copy write of the texture creator. Texture creators are fairly broadminded, for example if you decide to build a house you can sell it on any number of times. The only way you can sell textures as textures is to create them yourself and pay to upload, and this is very much enforced by Linden.

Hope this helps

Regards

John

Thank you very much, most helpful.

I now have a lovely plot of lawn, as I desired. Perfect for building my first house.....

TR

Welcome to SL!

The Owner or Estate Manager of a private sim can only control terrain textures on a sim-wide basis. They can pick 4 textures for 4 rough elevation bands, and can skew the relatinve altitudes at each corner of the sim. That's it. There is no parcel-level control of terrain texture, no matter who you are.

As for creating prims and using terrain textures on them, they do not by any means need to be flat prims. Any shape will do. The Library > Textures section in your inventory has quite a few nice textures for this purpose, for free. The textures there that have the word 'base' in them are lower resolution textures, and will rez faster for you. The ones that don't say 'base' are higher resolution, and provide better detail, though they rez more slowly.