planar ground textures

hi all,

When I am building I can choose from default or planar texture mapping.
What I like to see is the option to planar map textures on the ground.
If you deform the ground for moutains the textures are stretched out and they look weird.
I also would like to see an option to apply 1024x1024 textures. The computers are getting more and more powerfull so why not give us high quality ground textures.

Cheers,

Ami

That would be nice, but I think that to do it, we'd need an entirely different way of modeling terrain. Right now, the texture that is applied is locked in at 1 repeat every 4 Meters in the X and y direction, and it completely ignores vertical differences, with the exception of making the transition between the 4 terrain texture choices, based on height.

Terrain is a fixed 256 x 256 matrix, locked at 1 M intervals side to side. and variable in height, usually also in 1 M intervals (though the height multiplier layer in a .raw file can change that). It's actually a poly mesh object, rather than a prim.

Take a look at steeply sloped terrain in wireframe mode (Control-shift-r toggles this mode). Looks straight down, and that locked-in grid is very apparent. Look from the side, and you'll see that the triangular faces on the steeply sloped areas are much larger/longer than those in level areas. And the level of detail changes WAY too fast as you back off the camera, making most terrain a very coarse poly map indeed.

So doing a planar map on a poly-mesh terrain surface becomes much harder than doing it on a prim.

Okay, i get the picture. Thats what i thought was going on.
Now, what if we could select nodes in this the steeply sloped terrain in wireframe model?
Select and drag the nodes to finetune and sculpt the terrain and the display of the textures.
Wouldn't that be an exiting idea?

Cheers,

Ami

You can export a heightmap to something like Bryce, and can move the nodes up and down. But you won't be allowed to move the points in the X or Y planes. Only on the Z-axis. This is something I really want to experiment with, as Byrce should actually allow me to move single points precicely.

Unfortunately, no matter how precicely you do the heightmap, SL still does some odd interpolations between points to smooth the trerrain, so we occasionally get strange spikes and ridges and grooves where we least expect or want them. It would be intriguing to see how well a fine-tuned map done in Bryce could cope with this.