How do I set boundaries for SL water on my land?

I want to create a swimming channel on my land. I don't have to lower the land too far before reaching SL water. However, the channel becomes wider than is practical. How can I create a channel with prims and contain the SL water within them? Thanks.

There are basically two kinds of "water" in SL.

Real water is usually at about 20m. Dig down, and there it is.

Or, you can make imitation water. Make big prims, mark them phantom, partly transparent, blue, maybe with a picture of ripples, maybe with a script to make the ripples move. Put them in a sky box, embed them in the ground, whatever...

This has been discussed before. Search is your friend.

SL water is a flat plane at the 20M elevation. It extends edge to edge across the sim, and nothing contains it, in reality. Like the water table in the real world, it simply *is*, permeating everything in that plane and below.

You can carve a channel by terraforming, go below the 20M elevation, and it will have water in it.

You can make neater sides using prims, but the water still exists in any gap between those prims and the terraformed terrain. You must cover it to hide that.

For example, my home has an indoor pool that uses Linden Water. The land elevation is 21 M, and there is a roughly square pit, terraformed 4 M down, big enough that the bottom is larger than the bottom of the pool, and the sides slope up and out from there. The floor around the pool covers the sloping side area, as does a walkway around the outside of the house.

Alternatively, do NOT dig below 20M, and instead use srcipted prim water to swim in. This consists of textured cube prims that are long enough and wide enough to fill the pool volume. I like the "Prim Swim Water" by Siggy Romulus, used with his Swimmer HUD.

I'm creating the swim channel to use the Swimmer HUD. I'll check that the HUD I bought is by Romulus. I thought I'd read in the HUD info that it would only work in SL water that is chest deep. I'll check. Maybe it has to be Phantom.

I understand now that I have to cover water I don't want with prims or create the channel with "Prim Swim Water."

Very helpful. Thanks much.

Try creating a partition of your land that includes only your chanel site. Then set the rest or your land to no Edit by unchecking this option in the Land Options window, that way any changes you make to the chanel partition won't "bleed" to the rest of your land.

The flatten function seems to "bleed" the least of all the terraforming functions. Unfortunately not available as an lsl call.

You can use that on the banks of your channel.

I did make a section of a parcel into a new parcel, set it to allow terraform by anyone, then used an alt to set it the way I wanted without affecting the rest of the old parcel. If you can terraform both parcels, the separating border does not seem to help a lot.

if you are the SIM owner, you can raise the water level to whatever height you want. this is a simwide value, so raising it too high can put other people's property underwater...

Spuds, how do you raise the water level if you're a sim owner?

Sorry, I am not Spuds. Just wanted to point out that setting the water to anything but 20 makes it discontinuous with the void water level adjacent to the sim and that can make it harder to make a nice beach.

I think the sim water level is in the world menu somewhere.

I found it. My friend who owns the Sim said it will not allow him to change the water table. He changes it from anything besides 20, it just returns.