More Work on Legenda

I got an ok to use the name of the island, and the owner, Rexor Alviso. Yesterday (the 29th) was not too productive, as SL was down most of the morning (my best time for working). But, I installed a waterfall, and created some pools an the valley leading to the bay. I also worked a bit with Lost Liberty, the builder on the project, and showed off my work to Véronique and two other friends, Looky Lu and ComradeX Munson, and took some pictures of the work in progress.

A whole island to work on

Well, this is pretty exciting for me (and, I get excited when I terraform, a subject for a future post). I have a whole sim to work on, and I started today, at 9 am SL time. My client is a nice Italian man, and the island is a medieval, renaissance role playing sim. When I took a first look there was flat land, and a castle, and house. Here is a map of the layout



I made a proposal, and did a map.. I now do my maps in pencil by hand (RL). I find that way, I get a mental image of the land, which works better with the SL tools.


Today, December 28 I did the following:

1. chose terrain textures with my client
2. levelled old land, and dug out a river and lake, and two caves
3. roughly smoothed out land
4. built roofs for the caves
5. settled the house back on top of a cave

here is a picture of me and my client:

Terraforming Rules (by Patrice)

The Terraforming tools are very crude, compared with editing prims. There are no fine adjustments. So, some rules:

1. Practice somewhere where you can make mistakes- not near a building, on near a property line- your work can affect your neighbour's land.

2. Work small until you know what you are doing.. use the small land selection, and small bulldozer (the tool on land, when you don't use land selection).

3. Work in small increments, and wait for the results. If a sim is busy, or laggy, the land tools may be slow. Don't click impatiently!

4. Try finding a combination, that gives you a result you like. I often use Raise, Smooth, Flatten, Raise. The mesh underneath is unpredictable. If you use Raise, Raise, Raise.. you will soon get very sharp peaks, which can be hard to correct.

5. Be very careful with Revert Land.. it will take _all_ your land all the way back, to when it was baked (probably by the sim owner)- it is not like undo, in Photoshop!

Terraforming 1.0

Okies! I have shown a bit of work, and now, I want to show people some techniques. The terraforming tools in SL (at the current release) are very very basic. What I will put here, is a very simple, tryout.. kind of a "Hello World" for wannabe terraformers in SL.

Step one:
you need to own or have owner/modify land privileges. I will put a post later, on how to set this up, lets assume at this point you have it set up. The land turns a disconcerting shade of green, or red (depending on your privileges). You will want to toggle out of edit land, to check your results

Step two:
Choose menu Tools/Land and you should see something like this:


Then, click on select land, and you should be able to click and drag to select a small section:


You could then hit "Raise Land" and the "apply to section" button, and see something iike this:

My First Big Land work

Back in October, 2006, I became a panther, in Gor (a role playing community in SL). After a while, two friends, Govindira Galatea, Alice Mconnell and I started working on a panther forest, for us to live in, and fight in. The land we rented, was flat and featureless



and I volunteered to do the land forming. I had done a bit, on the beach that Veronique my wonderful wife, and I live on, in Iron Fist. Doing a whole forest was a much bigger undertaking. I made a 3D model for the other panthers to see:


In my next post, I will go over some of the techniques I learned to use... but I will end this with a picture of the finished land.

About this blog

I like my friend Cheyenne's blog so much, I decided to do one myself. I am going to make this blog about my business in Second Life (SL), which is terraforming, or modelling land. A bit like landscape architecture, except I get to make beaches, caves and mountains, even volcanoes!

Terraforming is not very well documented in SL, so, I will try to give examples, from work I have done, as I go along. I also hope, people will post comments and ask questions.

Welcome, and look forward to more posts soon