Tuesday, December 19, 2006

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!

1 comment:

parker said...

hi patrice,

good idea for a blog! we don't have many other written resources for terraforming, something that's not as easy as it looks.

i'm going to try your raise, smooth, level idea. the whole process of terraforming is iterative, and this seems like it would make things pleasant in those awkward repetitions between before and after. i usually level out those peaks after i'm done which seems counterproductive.

hope to see more!