Terraforming help!

Guys help!

If anyone knows good terraforming tutorial or reference, please let me know! I am struggling to flatten my land around the swimming pool and I just cant do it right! No matter what I do, I end up either having sand in my pool or empty holes around it...

Thanks a lot in advance!
Dendre Benelli

If you could get your pool installed on a 4 x 4 boundary, you could make that a separate parcel from the rest of your parcel. Then there would be less interaction between the two areas. You would need an alt that can only terraform one or the other.

Good pools have plenty of decking around them. That should cover any holes you can't avoid.

You're probably better off making a larger hole than you need, and covering up any excess with a prim with the appropriate grass texture (you can find all the grass textures in Library under Textures->Terrain Textures ) .. that way its easier to try to iron out the lumps around the edge of the hole without having to worry about getting it the exact size also

I haven't played with the various terraforming utilities like http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=335986 but it doesn't seem too expensive to try out

It's very unlikely you'll ever get an exact fit. The land mesh edit points form a grid in half-meter horizontal increments, which is nowhere near enough resolution to make the land tightly hug most walls. The only way to make it work out perfectly would be to build the walls specifically to fall right on the edit points. Chances are your pool wasn't built that way, especially if it's not rectangular.

Even if you were working right against the land edit grid though, you'd still have issues. First, you can never get a truly vertical cliff face. The top edge of any trench or hole will always be at least half a meter, horizontally, from the bottom edge. If you dig your hole deep enough, that could seem almost vertical, but since most mainland sims don't allow you to dig that deep, you're gonna have a noticeable slant.

Second, the appearance of the land mesh itself is always in flux. It gets redrawn every time you move your camera, level of detail constantly changing. So what looks right from one point of view could look horribly wrong from another. The best you can ever hope to do is create an approximation of the shape you want. Don't expect it ever to be precise.

I would go with Daniel's suggestion. Make the hole bigger than the pool, and then cover the gap with prims. In RL, in-ground pools always have a cement walk area around them anyway. Why not put one around yours? If you don't want cement, then texture the walk area to look like the surrounding land, just a Daniel said.

Sculpties can be a great help in 'terraforming' in that you can make mounds or smooth ramps up to other details, that go into the ground far enough that LOD changes won't open up any gaps. You can use a simple heightmap method to generate them, with the assistance of a program like hmap2sculpty

http://www.metaversesolutions.com/products.php

basically, you draw lower areas as black and higher areas as white and blur it to make sure a smooth transition.

you can see kind of the result here:
http://static.slexchange.com/modules/Marketplace/Images/e/b/1/eb16831c05c3df4013ebdd3daacebc43.jpg

the grass part was just drawn in photoshop as height map. With lossless uploading (sorta) here, you should be able to make different sections of sculpt line up well also as long as the textures themselves are identical along each side. Does that make any sense?

Thank you for all the suggestions!!!
I really appreciate your help! I
was stupid enough to build as I felt without any prior planning so I ended up having holes around my pool...
I saw a guy once in-world who could do miracles with the land. He could make a straight vertical cut and make a hole that was rectangular..He could also flatten land in a second. I asked him how he did it and he said it was a result of endless practicing...So thats why I thought it was possible with the right technique...
Anyway I will try all of your suggestions and hopefully make it work!

Dendre

As I said earlier, a truly vertical cut is impossible. The walls of the hole will always taper by .5M. If the hole is deep enough, then the slope of a .5M taper could look nearly vertical, but it will never be truly plum.

Anyway, to flatten your land in a second, simply grab the Select Land tool, draw a box around your land to select it all, tick the Flatten Land radio button, and then hit Apply To Selection a few times.

To dig a perfectly rectangular hole, use Select Land to outline the hole, tick the Lower Land radio button, and hit ApplyTto Selection.

Quick edits like that are really simple.

That is supposed to be fixed, or at least a debug option to enable/disable in Windlight. I cannot wait! The LOD will remain consistent no matter how far the distance. Terrain should remain static to the viewer!