Haplo,

I've always hand painted my terrains in GIMP. While very tedious, I've gotten very decent results from this. I usually paint in 5m increments, to get the general terrain height. I then go back and 'Smudge' in the appropriate places. This gives the terrain a rather natural look and feel, versus the rounded look that you get from the 'Blur' tool. Rounded comes across as much more cartoonish, and not very natural. I've used L3DT, but much prefer the hand painted method. In this way, get the rumple where I want one, smooth or flat where desired, and rocky and rough where appropriate.

While the terrain below looks rough, this is an incomplete sample. I still need to go back and apply further hand painted 'Smudge' to get the desired effect, which is to get rid of the obvious lines that produce staired terrain. However, I never 'Blur'.

The only time I get unwanted ripples in the terrain, is when I've used the 'Paintbrush' tool, which is gradient based, on forget to blend in the edges. But small little puddles and potholes add a touch of detail that I tend to overlook anyway.

Keep in mind that programs like L3DT account for things like water runoff and errosion. When generating terrain for you, it will add in those effects, which can lead to the rumpled look in the pic you posted. The "rumpled" pic looks more natural BTW.
Part of a mountain lake sim.

Shad MOrdre

Okay then two things:

Key, what process are you using. i.e. Software, steps, to create the greyscale 8-bit image that you are loading into the region. GIMP is saving my greyscale images automatically at 32bit. I have to create greyscale image, convert to indexed to get it down to 8-bit. I assume this is my problem.

Shad, although I agree it may look more natural, the problem is the rumples are not a naturally created event within opensim and therefore cause an inordinate amount of sinking into the ground, leg warping, etc. even more than usual.

Also, handpainting is great and I used to do that often as well - the project I am working on however is 4x4 and possibly larger, I would rather be able to use a 3d editor to start with like blender or Unity3d, then do touchups in GIMP, then load it into the regions.

I will be taking down my single region on OSGrid here soon and working on just my server so I don't cause issues while I build. I'm excited to start work on this project. It will be my first complete build in years this large (ever in opensim) and I am really looking forward to seeing it come to fruition and then seeing what people think of it when I finally finish it.

Thanks all,
- Hap

I use L3DT for terrain stuff, never have seen rumples.

(http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Using_L3DT)

Haplo,

Going back to your op, you stated that you saw very slight differences in the gray values when you zoomed in to 400%. Opensim will import whatever it sees, and in this case, it is seeing a difference in gray values, and thus interprets that as terrain change. I don't think it's an issue with OpenSim, but rather how the terrain is generated. Again, if you're using L3DT, chances are that L3DT is accounting for water runoff and/or erosion, which would certainly make those types of 'rumples' in the terrain. Importing a terrain into Opensim of course doesn't change the image file, Opensim just reads it. So it's the image file that has the rumples from the beginning.

Search around in L3DT and look for the erosion / water runoff settings, and chances are, that'll 'cure' the issue for you.

I've only really used .png files for terrain out of GIMP, but they've always imported as drawn, even under the newest version of Opensim.

Shad MOrdre

Problem solved - sort of.

I have no idea why, but I used L3DT again, but used the .r32 format rather than raw or png. Works perfectly without a single out of place ripple and still keeps all those natural looking bumps and such.

It has simply been forever since I making and loading my own heightmaps and I just don't remember anything beyond grayscale, 8-bit image - smoother the better as opensim interprets any harsh change in color as a harsh change in terrain of course.

I have yet to find a good plugin that will take the .r32 from L3DT into GIMP, but that is ok. I have the PRO version so it will automatically chop it up into 256x256 chunks for me no problem. It just irritates me as a do-it-yourselfer that I can't get it without some program doing the whole thing for me. LOL

Thanks for all the input and help everyone. Here's to a future build!

Take care,
- Hap

Haplo, thought I'd share one method I use on Linux to edit terrain heightmaps, as it's pretty neat. I use ImageMagick on the command line to edit a png heightmap while it's on my opensim VPS server, in my opensim/bin directory.

I was looking at Linda Kellie's terrains at http://www.lindakellie.com/terrain.htm and my favorite was Intertwined, 5th one down. So I grabbed it directly from her site to my opensim/bin directory with

Then I got experimental and thought this would look cool expanded as a group of regions. 3 x 3 seemed like a good one to try so with a simple command, I blew the image up to 768 x 768. People will gasp in horror at the thought, it's not something I would do with any image ordinarily, but hey, I was just messing around Of course, make sure ImageMagick is installed. In Ubuntu, just type


Now, with your command line location in the directory where the 256 x 256 terrain image is, type this ImageMagick command to enlarge the image:


You might think it wise to do a gaussian blur on the image to depixelize it after being enlarged--but I didn't bother and it turned out ok in the end. I had used this command in the past and it worked but this time I am getting syntax errors after trying several combinations so I gave up. Maybe someone can figure it out, or just don't bother - anyway, here is what I thought would work:


Moving on, you next need to slice up the image into 9 256 square images. This is where ImageMagick earns it's name! Here's the command:


Note, this is where the color depth is set for 8-bit. You could have done this above in the resize operation also, not sure if it makes any diff.

The ending file name is the destination file name of all your sliced images, with a number appended to the end of each one starting with zero. Magic, eh?

Do the ls (list) command and see:


Now you have 9 tiled images, so go ahead and create 9 regions and load the images for each one. I started with a fresh instance of Opensim to create the first region, then shut down and created the Regions.ini file manually for the remaining 8 regions. You can see them inworld by searching for Intertwined but that sim will likely not be online after June 31 so here's a pic from the map:

and here's a pic inworld, right at the corner junction where 4 regions meet, where a cube sits - the borders are pretty much undetectable:


You can go see for yourself while it's still up:
https://login.osgrid.org/region/Intertwined-NE/2/2/23

Hi Key,

I just visited. That is such a great design and that is very cool to see it expanded like that.

Thanks for the heads up on ImageMagick, I've seen many posts about it here and there but have never looked into it. I like the command line options, obviously the split image function is a plus for us in the sim world

Also, after some investigation, I am certain that there is a file format issue that is / was the problem in my case. OpenSim is very picky regarding what kind of information it wants and after going through the history of loading terrain from the console it would appear that regardless of what file format you use - .png .r32 - it is translating the image using the same seek information. 8-bit, greyscale, and other options are arguable it seems.

For now at least L3DT pro will spit out the 256 size chunks I need and I'm really glad I'm getting to create again. I'm already stumping myself and figuring out how to make new scripts and objects to move on to the next piece! hehe.

Thanks again for all the great info and help!
- Hap