Landscaping

Can anybody tell me how I can create a field of flowers that will blow in the wind? I'm new to this, so I need step by step, if anyone can help. Thank you! I want to make it as a surprise for my fiancee'!

Sweet gesture.

You're gonna need a little patience and a lot of flexi prims for this. First, put a picture of a flower (or bunch of flowers) on a transparent background, and upload it to SL as a texture. Apply the texture to the front and back of a flattened cube. Duplicate the cube, and rotate it 90 degrees to form a criss-cross pattern with the first cube. Make sure both cubes share the same center point.

Now, courtesy of the alpha sorting glitch, you'll have what appears to be a flower (or bunch of flowers) from pretty much any angle you look at it. Give both cubes flexi settings (accessible via the Features tab on the editor) so that they sway in the wind to your satisfaction. I'd suggest giving them both the same settings, so they move in sync. Link them together.

Duplicate the flower object as many times as you'd like (keeping in mind prim allowances for the amount of land you have), and cover your field with them. There you go.

Now that you know how, there are a few things you should probably be aware of before you begin. First if you put the flowers too close together, you're likely to have alpha sorting problems (see the transparency guide at the top of the texturing form for more info on this), which may hurt the appearance of the field. Second, it's unlikely you'll be able to make enough flowers this way to cover a very large area. At two prims per bunch, you could only put 58 bunches on a 512 square meter plot, or roughly one for every 8 square meters. That's not enough to cover it very densely, even if you put a lot of flowers on your texture image. You may need to settle for just packing it all into a small area, or else coming up with a different valentine idea.

So you know, when you see lush fields of flowers, grasses, etc., in CGI movies, it's usually done using a multitude of techniques of which SL is not capable. We can't do paint effects or hair/fur simulations, for example, in SL. All we have to work with are primitives, textures, and rudimentary particles, none of which are very well suited for what you're trying to do. Sorry I don't have better news.

well although they wont blow in the wind you can make a field of particle flowers. There are various scripts (which i dont have hehe) that use particles to create flower fields you just pop in the texture you want of a flower and it make a nice field of flowers. I have seen a few in action I dont know where they got them. MIght want to browse the scripting forum there might be an open source one you can snatch and use

the prim flowers will blow in the wind maybe you can use both and get the desired effect?

Thanks both!

I recall there was a thing called "Field of dreams", or something similar, a scripted object that would cover a large area of ground with temp-on-rez flowers. But I don't think those moved, and I fear recent problems regarding use of temp-on-rez objects in SL may have rendered that gadget impossible to use. Anyone know?

There are lots of different emitters and what they are is basically a particle generator using a plant texture. There are grass emitters, flower emitters, water plant emitters, fish emitters.... The problems that I've run into when using them is that you need to be very close to the emitter to see the textures, just like any particle effect. The Field of Dreams used to be available for free at Yadni's and I have a grass particle generator I can give you - I believe it is also a freebie with copy/trans perms. I don't know if there is any way to make particle generated textures also be flexi.

So, unfortunately, creating a field of flowers either requires an unholy number of prims or using emitters that you will only see if you are in range, which seems to be somewhere around 20m.

i just finished a simple Lotus Garden that rezzes Lotuses (Loti?) in a small pond. IM me in world (anoyone) and I will give you a full mod copy. it should be more or less clear how to change it to work with your flowers.

I also have a half completed kluge based on the Field of Dreams idea. it is an invisible prim that wanders around randomly generating flowers as particles. YOu are welcome to it.

other possible ideas...

A texture showing a field of flowers, with a smaller numbers of flexi flowers scattered here and there.

Field of Dreams is in the forums...
/8/a0/26220/1.html

The reason for this is that particles are only visible if the prim that is emitting them is visible, based on the clients draw distance etc. Make the emitter prim larger and the particles should be able to be seen from further away.