Carpeting the earth...?

I've made a cave by digging a trench and putting a short solid split tube (providing an entrance) and a solid hollow hemisphere over it. I will eventually cover the whole thing with a phantom sculptie to give it an appearance more like a boulder with a cave under it than a dome, but the mossy texture outside and granite texture inside will do as a placeholder for now. As an enclosed space, it looks halfway decent. My plan is to lay down a carpet and some lamps, a comfortable place for a puppy like me to crawl off to and sleep.

Now after much fiddling with terraforming to smooth things as much as I can while still having a sizable pit to descend into, I have an irregular (relatively bumpy) surface at the bottom of the cave. I'm trying to keep this place looking natural without jarringly flat surfaces. Is it possible to make a non-rigid prim that will settle down over the shape of the landscape that I can then texture as a carpet?

Also, as a simple mainland min-sized property owner and not the keeper of an entire estate, is there a way I can extract a z-map of my parcel so that I can model textures outside the world before I pay my $10L to bring things in?

If I can do the latter, I can probably make a rigid sculptie if I have to although placement will be a real bear (appropriate enough to a cave I suppose).

Lupestro

scripts can measure the ground height, normal and direction where height will not change for any xy coordinate.

to the mapping question, yes there is, it's a freebie, forget who it's don by called terrainsculptor. search for it and you will find the creator give a URL for it, will make a sculpty or hieghtmap of your sim for you

edit.

found the url for the page

http://spinmass.blogspot.com/2007/08/terrain-sculptor-maps-sims-and-creates.html

Many thanks, rosie! I'll look into that link - a rigid object for the right spot should make a good first approximation.

Ollj - your comment was a little cryptic, but it does suggest some possibilities. Would it be possible to create a "scriptie" , a paper-thin sculptie that, upon a placement-related event, consults the ground height at each relevant point in its grid to set its own sculpt map? Sounds intriguing.... I could see a lot of uses for slices of a material like that - river bottoms, etc. A brief moment of potentially big math when it first rezzes, but it would be cool. Perhaps I could afford to use a coarser grid to simplify the calculations...

But is the sculpt map manipulable via the LSL?

Lupestro

You can change the sculpt map, and the sculpt object type but that's it.

http://www.lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llSetPrimitiveParams

And I can see from the link that the sculpt map is specified by a GUID or name. Hmmm...

Is it possible to use a script to create a sculpt map byte-by-byte in LSL or do they have to be imported from a file? (This is obviously something you would want to do seldom, but it could be done with a temporary touch script or something after the thing is placed.) Will it still cost me L$10 per shot?

Also, would a PRIM_FLEXIBLE prim help me here? I know that is used for clothing, although I haven't had much need for that... fur suffices. I gather they end up with one rigid edge and the rest sort of hangs - can this be used on the ground to do a carpet or will it only work for the hanging physics of clothing?

Pardon the newbie questions. I'll start trying this stuff when I get home tonight, but it would be useful to know if I'm barking up the wrong tree before I start... Just a month past my second rezday and I'm finally moving ahead with a lot of the ideas I've had since I joined - trying to think of everything a self-respecting canine would want for a habitat and building it into my own little 512. <Sigh - no squirrels or rabbits to chase>

Lupestro

Sculpt maps are textures, so no, LSL cannot create a sculpt map. There are in-world tools, however, that can, ,but they use out-of-world bits on their end as wlel, and you still have to upload the texture yourself.

Flexiness is used for many things, but only works with boxes, cylinders, and cubes, I believe (If there are others, then I'm just not remembering which). It makes the center of rotation one end, and everything else flexy, and you can define various properties of its behaviour. They're used in more than just clothing, but they are always phantom, and the detail can be lowered, so effects are purely aesthetic and WILL change from viewer to viewer/person to person.