Rural driveway, in the spirit of Cape Cod

I've seen roads and walkways made of textured flat panels laid partway into the ground. I'd like to use this approach to build a driveway or country lane that has two ruts of packed sand or crushed seashells and a center crown of grass. I imagine a sculpted prim that is 10 meters long by a car-width wide, and deep enough to show a contour like:

-u----u-

I'm still new to SL. I've worked with Yukuru Jewell's Rokuro (lathe) to make sculpted textures. Now I see he has written an extruder as well, Tokoroten. I'm going to experiment to see if I can extrude shapes like this contour. I wonder how to make it curve...

Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing?

I just made some roads that wind across a couple of sims, using the "prims in a trench" method. In that method, you terraform a trench the shape of the road, and fill it with prims textured with the road gravel. It works, but making smooth road edges that curve is quite difficult.

The problem is that the terrain grid only has a horizontal resolution of 1 Meter. It is possible, with either imported terrain heighmaps (in a *.raw file imported by the sim owner) or the in-world building tools, to make a trench that makes a suitable curving road, or even a footpath. But the narrower you make it, the harder it is to do snything that isn't dead straight and lined up on the 1-meter gridlines. So I think that no matter what you do, you won't be able to set prims into the ground to make narrow 'wheel ruts", unless they actually stick up above terrain height.

Now, what you *might* be able to do is to make a shaped sculpty prim that has terrain textures on sloped edges, leading up slightly to your ruts, and with the crowned center between, again textured with terrain textures. Like the road was on top of a slight berm.

However... forum posts here indicate that you can't walk directly on the surface of a sculpted prim. The collision box for a sculpty does not match its surface. So even if you make a sculpty road, you can't walk on it properly.

Yeah, that kind of kills it. Can't drive a 1950s Willys on sculpty ruts. I had the same experience trying to make sand dunes out of sculpty shapes-- walking over them was bizarre. They didn't look right either.

Field of Dreams was disappointing in its own ways. It makes me wish I could simply lay a texture on the terrain...

You might be suprised how well some good photographs of your ruts with sand and seashells on flat prims will work. When you are looking at the environment in SL, you brain is already inclined to interpret what it sees as 3d. If you insert a 2d image that has the right perspective and lighting, it will blend in and look 3d. It is all illusion.