Terrain Sculptor - Maps Sims and Generates Sculpties

I've made a .NET application called Terrain Sculptor which uses libsecondlife to map sims and generate sculpties of them. It also downloads the world-map image for use as a texture, and the elevation data can be saved as a binary dump or as a grayscale image. It generally takes a few seconds after logging in to complete. Links to the application and the source code (and more comments) are on my blog:
http://spinmass.blogspot.com/2007/08/terrain-sculptor-maps-sims-and-creates.html

I attached a screen shot of the app and a resulting sculpty. As far as I know I'm the only one who's run it so far, but hopefully there are no gotchas. The app has a similar purpose to the system Anjin shared, although apparently his uses a scripted object and http versus libsl.

Very nice. Just tried it out, quite slick. Suggestion, but its kinda minor: Unify the save system. I saved a sculpt map through the menu, then couldn't figure out how to save the map texture... took me a minute to realize that all of the textures were being automatically saved elsewhere.

Very cool!

I'm always a big fan of Cadroe's stuff. Going to play with it right now!

Reitsuki - Glad to hear it worked for you. I'll try to make the save system clearer. I only put in manual saving through the File menu so a user could open an existing .elv file to generate a sculpty or grayscale heightmap, instead of logging into SL and remapping the terrain. One possibility I considered was removing the File menu and adding a "Force Save" button in the Auto Save panel. Also, I thought maybe a notice could appear in the window somewhere, like "Auto Saved Files for Seacliff".

Desmond - Hope you enjoy it. I mapped all of Caledon several times testing this thing. I think it was Caledon Highlands that helped me fix a bug related to negative elevations

Hah! I just finished doing the same thing! I've been playing with this like a new toy for an hour and am *quite* behind on some RL work due to it!

Gods, this thing is glorious!

Expect to find a sculptie map of Caledon at the Guvnah's mansion (prolly upstairs in the ballroom) once I get my head around it all.

I've got rough .raw files of future Caledon sims... I don't have a sim clear at the moment, but I am SO filling in the 'invisible' regions once I get the next, so I can go from:

.raw --> terrain --> sculptie map

...and show people what shall be coming soon!


Hrm. I seem to have discovered a subterranean tunnel network under parts of Victoria City... I wonder what *that* is all about? Intrigue... the game is afoot!

grins

Very cool, Cadroe. I'd love to see it work both ways. Generate a sculpty from terrain or generate terrain from a sculpty.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it, Desmond! Thanks, Chosen.

What I'll plan on doing, when I get time, is adding support for sim .raw files and importing of heightmap images (in addition to saving them). That way you could generate a sculpty straight from a sim raw file. I'm not sure about loading a sculpty, only because there's no single way to map terrain to sculpties. But importing heightmap images would be pretty flexible, I think. And from there you could save as a raw file. A lot of this code is already in the library I use with Bailiwick, really.

Great Work Cadroe!

Looks great!

I believe I just got the same error message after trying this awesome looking software for the first time. Anyone got it working again?

I got the same error on one account, but on the next try with another, I was able to log in fine.

What a cool toy!

I did notice though that it also grabs an image of the objects (my buildings were under my prim water) on the given region, so I simply made my own ground texture in Bryce for the proper dimensions and look to go on the sculpty.

and this thing didn't get me in heaps of trouble when trying it *looks at up at Cadroe*

im getting a login error: unable to connect to remote server
i killed my firewall and same error on alt and main account
not sure what else to try

I don't suppose this will ever get ported to something that we Macintosh users can use? *sigh* Looks sweet, but won't run on my OS...

It's a .NET application, so it's unlikely it could be ported in its current form. You can run Windows on Macs now, can't you?

All we need now is the rumor that there is a new bot that copy an entire sim and then upload it back into SL.

Anyway, nice work, Cadroe. It worked fine for me. Not exactly sure what to use it for, but it was fun.

Could it be modified to only make a sculpty for *my* property? Then I could use it to make snow, or leaves, or other ground like replacements maybe.

Also, it was annoying how the edges of the sim dropped down to elevation 0 (I think). I loaded it into wings to adjust that. Does it have to be a sphere/sculpty, or can you map it onto a plane?

Yes, if I pay for a copy of Windows XP or Vista, I could install it under Bootcamp on my Mac OSX 10.5 system, and could dual-boot in either OS. But right now I have little reason to spend hundreds of dollars to install an OS that I don't generally like using. I may do that eventually, but I have better uses for my money at the moment.

And actually, if this app generates an accurate greyscale heightmap for the sim it examines, then yes, it CAN be used to upload that heightmap (via a .raw file) into a sim someone else owns, to clone the terraforming of a sim. It wouldn't copy anything else, but could duplicate the terraforming exactly. (Assuming the heightmap is accurate, which I would imagine it is.)

I'm glad people have found the tool useful

I seem to have successfully produced planar sculpties for the sim terrain. I've also updated the Terrain Sculptor to use the latest version of libsl, which maybe will fix weird login problems. I've been working on a newer version of the tool based on a library of code I've developed for SL programming, but I'm not sure when that will be done, so I'll try to get this update of the old version available quickly. There is an issue caused by the newer version of libsl I'll need to address but hopefully that won't be too complicated (for the curious, libsl clients can start receiving terrain data before being notified of a sim change, which breaks an assumption in my code).

Yes, you could use the output of Terrain Sculptor to "clone" sim terrain for your own use. This isn't something new though. If someone is allowed to visit a sim with scripts turned on, they can map the terrain. My Cartifex project from a while ago used LSL scripts and email to map the grid: http://www.spinmass.com/2life/Cartifex.htm .

I *believe* that the Mono framework is available for MacOS, and to my understanding, most properly written .NET stuff can be made to run under Mono... Not real sure, but worth checking into...

Tas

It works fine on Linux using Mono. I used it to get the terrain image, but generated the sculpty with my own code (using scripts and some postprocessing, like Cadroe suggested)

OK, I got version 1.1 done. I'm going to do the lazy thing and just copy and paste my blog entry about it For download links just go to the blog entry:

http://spinmass.blogspot.com/2008/01/terrain-sculptor-version-11.html

Terrain Sculptor version 1.1 is now available. Terrain Sculptor is an open source program I've written which uses a libsl bot to automatically map sims and generates sculpty textures of their terrain. The key updates in this version are planar sculpties and avatar movement.

1.0 used the default spherical projection for sculpties, which meant the sides wrapped under and joined. 1.1 uses the planar type, which produces a sculpty much like an actual sim in SL. Unfortunately a script is necessary to change the sculpty type to planar, but one is included in the README (and see below). The "decal" versions of the web map image are no longer generated because they are not neeeded with a planar sculpty.

Second Life has gotten more clever about recognizing when terrain is visible to an avatar, and it doesn't send terrain data that the client doesn't need to render. So I've added the ability to move the avatar around to force all the terrain into view. The avatar's position is updated automatically on the web map image of the sim.

Here is the script to change the sculpty type to planar. I thought I'd post it here because people might find it convenient for setting planar sculpties in general. First drag the sculpty texture into the prim's inventory (it should be the only texture there). Then place this script into the prim's inventory. It will automatically set the sculpty texture to the texture in the inventory, set the sculpty type to planar, and then delete itself.

default
{
state_entry()
{
string theKey = "";
string theName = llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_TEXTURE, 0);
if (theName != ""
theKey = llGetInventoryKey(theName);
if (theKey == ""
{
llOwnerSay("No sculpty texture found";
}
else
{
llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_TYPE, PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT,
theKey, PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_PLANE]);
llOwnerSay("Sculpty texture set to: " + theName);
}
llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
}
}

im still getting an error logging in, no response from server, i turned off firewall

Yay! I love this tool Cadroe, can't wait to try out this version of it!