Terrain Editing

Other than using the raise/lower land and land smoothing tools, is there anyway to make land totally flat?

I am hoping that someone has made a tool that enables me to highlight all my land and just flatten nice and quick !.

I have tried using the flatten land function, but all it seems to do is make some parts of the land flat which in turn, makes other parts uneven!

Is it just me doing somat wrong?/

Thanks In advance

If you own land on the mainland, you can only change it to plus or minus 4 m from its original level, so perhaps you hit the limits. Private sim land owners and renters who have been given terraforming rights can go to plus minus 100m, depending on sim settings.

Ed, thanks for your reply,
the problem I have is my land is on different levels, and I basically wanna make it nice and flat.

I have built on it previously, using the highest point as the place to put my floor, hence giving me a flat surface, but it seems silly to end up with a huge space under neath my building, which is why i wanna make the land nice and flat

As Ed said, the problem is probably that you're hitting the terraform limits, especially if it's mainland. If the terrain, as saved in the .raw file for that sim when it was created, or the last time the terraforming was saved by the sim owner, is supposed to be shaped in a way that has a gully in one area and a hill in another, and they are more than 8 M different in elevation, then no tool is going to allow you to make that parcel perfectly flat, if its mainland and the terraform limit is +/- 4M. You could bring the gully up 4M, and the hill down 4M, and the difference between them can't be flattened.

Okay, but I'm in a private estate and having the same problem. the hedge maze I am building is suffering because the ground curves and has craters and small humps everywhere - some from my previous attempts to make it level. Now, equal sized hedge walls are level with the ground in some places and in others are ending up with one end floating in midair.

The standard flattening tool is far to generic to do this most effectively. On SLBoutique I noticed two terraforming tools that allow someone to actually get a readout of land height above a set point, and one that sends out digging orbs that do things more quickly. Are any of these good?

I haven't used those specific tools myself, but I've watched a few others use that or something similar. If the terraform limits are not an issue, they should work.

One problem I have seen is in the degree of variation between data points in the terrain mesh, and the vertical resolutiuon.

When you create a .raw file to import for an island's terrain, you can specify a "height multiplier layer" in addition to the height field. The height field data, by default, is a range of 0-255 meters, one meter for each level of grey in the height map layer - a resolution of 1 meter vertically. If you set the multiplier to the right value to get a 0.50 multiplier, that height field range is 0 to 127 Meters, as it divides the height map values by two. But that yields a vertical resolution of 1/2 meter, and makes for smoother terrain.

Regardless of what resolution terrain is initially created at, rapid changes between data points cause interpolation errors in the surrounding terrain. So if you have a steep cliff or a deep hole, the edges and especially inside corners of these depressions, as well as the land around them, gets bumpy and less flat.

I have a sim where I designed it with a perfectly flat plateau at 60M elevation, surrounded on two sides by steep hills and on the other two by at least a 20M drop off to the next terrace down. The contours were smooth, and I had no 'jaggies.

Exporting the .raw file and re-importing it a couple of times, as various residents dug major basements or reshaped coastlines, often had the unintended effect of changing the height multiplier to something far more coarse, like 1.28 to 1. Suddenly hillsides that formerly were smooth and graceful looked like stepped terraces, and flat plateaus became heavily rippled. In some cases we had to re-instell the previous .raw file, because the new one was so bad.

Since then I have been strictly using in-world tools to clean up and refine my own part of that sim. If you do find a tool that does a better job of flattening a selected area, I would love to try it myself.

hmm, that's kinda scary. when i had an island i used the .raw file as a backup, and also restored it a few times after deciding to go back after making a change i didn't like. if it's "lossy" and rounds the values it sounds like it's not really reliable, especially if you have small and subtle details.

to the original point, if terraform limits aren't the issue you should be able to flatten it with the editing tools (takes a few passes with "flatten" selected and hitting apply to selection) then raising or lowering to suit. then you would need some cleanup. i find smooth is the best tool for that, around the edges, scrubbing over the property line and any hard corners so it flows better.

if you find you can't get to the right height by lower/raise, use the tool to lower or raise a small part of the land, then use the flatten tool to scrub over the rest, starting on the ideal height then working out.

but consider leaving a few bumps and swells in place to make it look more natural, if you can (at least outside the building footprint).