Burying and uncovering prims to make a path

I just had an idea for a garden path and I want to ask if it's doable before I go digging up my land or reinventing the wheel. I want the path to be like hardened earth, not a brick sidewalk like you see so many places. I thought I might almost bury 10 x 10 flat prims and then build up the land a little around the sides, narrowing it to make a more gentle curve than I could make using a hollowed cylinder. Let's see if I can draw an ascii picture:


[forget the ascii picture. That failed utterly!]

Do you know what I'm trying to do? This would be a gentler curve than hollowing a 10 x 10 flat quarter cylinder you see so often as parts of sidewalks. I could connect these mostly buried 10 x 10 square prims for a meandering dirt path around the yard.

Do others do it this way and do you have this much control over the land sculpting tools? -- KC

I can't really make sense of your diagram, but if I'm reading your description right, I do something similar all the time. Bury a bunch of contiguous 10x10 cubes just under the surface of the ground. Then use the Lower Land tool to "dig" your pathway in any shape you want. This can make for excellent naturally shaped pathways with perfectly seamless texturing.

On complex builds that will require a lot of paths, I'll often have a sheet of subterranean cubes spanning the entire region. Then it's just a matter of drawing all the pathways with the Lower Land tool. It works great.

For paths that go up and down hills, simply make the cubes taller, and taper them. This way, you get completely seamless texturing across the whole thing, and everyone always goes "How'd you do that?" afterwards. Deceptively simple things like that are always fun.

Look at Amarin Xi and Amarin Bei as two sims where I made paths like that. It worked well, but you'll find some limitations.

It's difficult to accurately sculpt smooth-flowing path edges for curved paths, using the terrain sculpting tools. The problem is that the terrain has a fixed 1M resolution horizontal grid (the X and Y position of each point), and by default the vertical resolution (Z) is also one meter. So any action that moves a point on the grid moves one of the horizontal x-y points up or down one notch in this 3D grid. You can never move a point sideways - only up or down. The impact on adjacent points is interpolated, and this will sometimes cause REALLY strange spikes and dips to appear, which can sometimes be hard to eliminate. And while you can easily lower the path area in 4M wide increments along paths that run directly N-S or E-W, doing angles or curves doesn't follow rows of grid points, and so the edges are often not quite what you desire.

But yes, it CAN be done, and the results can be well worth the effort!

Thank you both for understanding exactly what I was trying to ask.

I do have a gentle slope in places, so I'm interested in trying the tapered prims for this. That could be a lot easier to control than trying to rotate them.

I looked at the two Amarin sims. Yes, that is the effect I'm looking for. And when I wasn't watching my step, I enjoyed my little plummet through your Bridge of Eternal Peril between them. Clever way to justify the pitfalls of the sim border.

--KC

now that's what I call "It's not a bug, it's a FEATURE" =)