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Greetings Dear Reader-
It has been a big exciting week for the Chipster and me.
Our new sim was transferred over, and we started to terraform it-
Since this was a process that I had to do a lot of Internet research to
figure out, I thought I would share the salient points with all you
aspiring terraformers.
Ok, here is the land- looking rather waffle like at our first glance- Yuk!
Those of you who know me, know that I am an obsessive planner- so of course, I modeled out my sim in SketchUp, to see how it would lay out. There were a few requirements I needed to fulfill- a loch for landing seaplanes on, horse trails (of course), vehicular access, someplace for the Mer friends, and my new tree shop.
From the SketchUp plan, I pulled off the topo lines and went over to PhotoShop to make a gray scale "height map". Each shade of gray indicated to the terrain in SL, what height it shall be. Black is the lowest- o meters elevation- white is the highest- 255m elevation or there abouts, it can vary depending on some other land reading factors, that I will point out in a bit.
When I had filled in the topo in a gray scale palette, I saved it and loaded it into a nifty little program called Bailiwick. This will take in your jpg image, and add the layers necessary to make a RAW file that the land engine in SL can read. Here you can tweak things like landmarks area, plots for sale, as well as the land scale settings, so your land height factors are reasonable and not at all like the Himalayas ( unless that is what you want).
And then about 30 seconds after we loaded the finished RAW file into the SL database- Poof! magically, new terrain! How cool is that?
Now, like Goldilocks deciding on here bowl of porridge, I looked over the results of the 3 versions of height maps had prepared, and settled on the most natural looking one. So- At last! Sundial is born, and I can start the build.
Luna Rai Gunn who was with me during this whole process, decided that the perfect thing for my new loch, was a Nessie. So she became one, much to my amusement and Chip's confusion.
So here we are, in our new shop and sim. We are putting in our evergreens- very low prim- and the platforming early. When MONO becomes available in our sim (which is soon) we are adding the season changing trees and soon the whole sim will change seasons on a daily basis.
Watch for the announcement of our grand opening- we look forward to seeing you!
It has been a big exciting week for the Chipster and me.
Our new sim was transferred over, and we started to terraform it-
Since this was a process that I had to do a lot of Internet research to
figure out, I thought I would share the salient points with all you
aspiring terraformers.
Ok, here is the land- looking rather waffle like at our first glance- Yuk!
Those of you who know me, know that I am an obsessive planner- so of course, I modeled out my sim in SketchUp, to see how it would lay out. There were a few requirements I needed to fulfill- a loch for landing seaplanes on, horse trails (of course), vehicular access, someplace for the Mer friends, and my new tree shop.
From the SketchUp plan, I pulled off the topo lines and went over to PhotoShop to make a gray scale "height map". Each shade of gray indicated to the terrain in SL, what height it shall be. Black is the lowest- o meters elevation- white is the highest- 255m elevation or there abouts, it can vary depending on some other land reading factors, that I will point out in a bit.
When I had filled in the topo in a gray scale palette, I saved it and loaded it into a nifty little program called Bailiwick. This will take in your jpg image, and add the layers necessary to make a RAW file that the land engine in SL can read. Here you can tweak things like landmarks area, plots for sale, as well as the land scale settings, so your land height factors are reasonable and not at all like the Himalayas ( unless that is what you want).And then about 30 seconds after we loaded the finished RAW file into the SL database- Poof! magically, new terrain! How cool is that?
Now, like Goldilocks deciding on here bowl of porridge, I looked over the results of the 3 versions of height maps had prepared, and settled on the most natural looking one. So- At last! Sundial is born, and I can start the build.
Luna Rai Gunn who was with me during this whole process, decided that the perfect thing for my new loch, was a Nessie. So she became one, much to my amusement and Chip's confusion.
So here we are, in our new shop and sim. We are putting in our evergreens- very low prim- and the platforming early. When MONO becomes available in our sim (which is soon) we are adding the season changing trees and soon the whole sim will change seasons on a daily basis.Watch for the announcement of our grand opening- we look forward to seeing you!
