Precision Terraforming

I have the hardest time with terraforming. I often end up just flattening it out and covering it with distractions because I can just never get the land tool to cooperate.

At this time, I'm attempting to make a basement under this beautiful Cory Edo log cabin I've got. Actually the basement's finished, but now I have to fill in the land around it. Even with the smallest selection size, if I raise the land up flush with my home's foundation, land always tapers through the walls inside the basement. If I go inside the basement and lower the land below the floor, no matter how careful I am, the land outside my home always gets sunk, leaving a big trench around the house.

Are there any scripted tools that allow editing of very small areas, or prevent the extreme tapering that seems to occur when raising/lowering land?

(*scratches her head* Hmm I do have a land leveling tool... I wonder what would happen if I shrunk it down to tiny size, like .5m x .5m...)

Hi Wildefire,

As far as I have been able to determine, that steep slope on the sides of an 'excavation' is impossible to completely eliminate. I've made several places now with 'basements', and even made a hollow mountain with a 5-story tall structure hidden inside it. But no matter what I did, the mesh between two adjacent points always sloped. I believe this is because SL is mapping the terrain from a flat plane, and can't locate the grid points of that plane over one another. You can streach it enormous distances, but you can't fold it, or make the distance between grid points in the x-y plane any closer or farther apart.

The solution is to either design your basement smaller than the foundation of the house, so the 'trench' between the basement walls and the top edges of the excavation is hidden under the house's foundation slab, or else do something to hide the trench.

My recommendation? Make flower beds. Use prims, textured like mulch or topsoil, and use them to cover the top of the trench around the house, positioning them just below the surrounding ground level. A few well-placed patios, planters and walkways added to that should make it far less obvious that the ground level under the house isn't actually flat.

That's a wonderful idea, Ceera! Thanks!

No problem, my friend...

I had to come up with that flower bed ploy when landscaping a client's home a while back. It was in one of the new sims with only a +/- 4M terraform limit, and there were spots around her foundation and patio where it was simply impossible to bring the land up to meet the foundation. (The house had a hot tub that extended below foundation level, and the land under that was already at maximum depth). So, I started using planters and prim flower beds to hide the gaps. Turned out so nice that I add then now even when it isn't absolutely needed to cover gaps...

Now, why do I feel like Martha Stewart?