73
5
Virtual Terrain and
Designing Landscapes
I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
—Luis Barragan
5.1 TERRAIN IS MORE THAN JUST DIRT
Our terrain denes us; we are mountain people, coastal dwellers, or plains residents. Terrain can provide our
physical defense or force us to recognize our physical weakness, and throughout the world, sacred places on
our terrain are a source of mythology or spiritual beliefs [1, 2].
From an aerial perspective, a cityscape might appear to be primarily at, but even New York City has
hills, and that terrain overlooks valleys lled by the mighty rivers that surround it. As a designer, you can
create a terrain that has a powerful effect on the experience of your visitor once you have mastered the
fundamentals of loading and editing it in a virtual environment.
5.1.1 fundamenTal aspeCTs of a VirTual Terrain
In a virtual world, terrain is a surface patch or netlike structure of interconnected vertices. On a terraformed
sim (virtual environment simulation), this looks like a sherman’s net thrown over a bumpy, irregular surface,
but on a new sim, it is displayed as a at plane. Typically, upon creation, the at plane of land is elevated to just
above the standard sea level of 20 meters so the avatar is not walking underwater. By accessing the wireframe
render style, you can see how the mesh of the landscape is altered once it has been terraformed, as shown in
Figure5.1. The wireframe mode can be accessed in the Develop menu, which along with the Advanced menu,
is activated on the top bar of the Firestorm viewer after the basic installation is done. Use the key commands
of (Ctrl+Alt+D) and then (Ctrl+Alt+Q) respectively to turn on these hidden menus. Using (Ctrl+Shift+R) will
let you see the wireframe once the Develop menu is showing. Note more information about key commands
and the Firestorm viewer is available here, (http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/keyboard_shortcuts).
As you can see in Figure 5.1, after the land has been terraformed, the surface patch or terrain takes
on the distortions that provide for the creation of hills and valleys, mountains, and coastlines in your
virtual environment.
Just changing the landscape from at into low hills adds more visual interest to your developing virtual
scene because it allows for the visitor to “discover” your space. Think about how you enter a great valley
from a mountain overpass or how hills atten to the coastline as a river nears a sea. Each landscape we
create in a virtual world can tell the story of a voyage. If you utilize that “storytelling” concept in your
design, it will have great inuence on your visitor’s perception of the environment and the contents you
have built in it.
74 Virtual World Design
FIGURE 5.1 Screen grabs from OpenSim showing virtual terrain using two kinds of rendering. In the top two images,
the at initial terrain and its wireframe structure are shown, and in the bottom two images, a “terraformed” landscape
and its wireframe structure is shown.
75Virtual Terrain and Designing Landscapes
5.1.2 researCh and finding inspiraTion for maKing Compelling Terrain designs
There are many places you can nd inspiration for your landscape designs. Watching documentary lms like
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea by Ken Burns [3] or looking at the 3D worldwide terrain geogra-
phy available on Google Earth should provide you with a broad range of excellent examples displaying the
magnicent compelling terrains we have around us.
For more aesthetic inspiration, to nd the “mood” and “personality” in a landscape, look to the great
landscape paintings throughout history. As early as the Minoan and Roman eras, we painted images of our
landscapes, inspired by what we saw around us. Worldwide, our common desire to make images of our land-
scapes is shown in the work of Chinese painters like Fan Kuan, Tabriz from Persia, and Toyo and Hiroshige
from Japan. In Europe, there were painters such as Friedrich from Germany, Turner from England, and Corot
from France. In more modern eras, Van Gogh, Cezanne, O’Keefe, Thiebaud, and Sanchez have created land-
scapes that speak to our souls. Online searches for “great landscape paintings” and “best landscape painters”
will bring up hundreds of examples for you to examine.
For inspiration of a more virtual nature, visit places in Second Life and OpenSim. Examples of several
interesting landscapes are shown in Figure5.2. In the top picture, you see the sculpted mesh mountains sur-
rounding the Oni Kenkon Creations Tower built by Nebadon Izumi on the OS Grid. Inthe middle picture
is an image of Shambala, a massive multiregion build surrounded by an estuary, built by Hiro Protagonist.
The bottom frame shows a two-picture sequence of Mac Kanashimi’s “Scripted Fractal Landscape,” built in
Second Life, in the LEA27 region. This incredible build constantly shifted its underlying shapes to create an
ever-changing landscape for the visitor.
5.2 METHODOLOGIES FOR TERRAFORMING USING INWORLD TOOLS
There are two inworld methodologies for creating changes in your terrain, and they are not mutually exclu-
sive. The rst and most universally accessible is using the Land Tools in the Build menu of your Firestorm
Viewer. Anyone can utilize these tools, provided the Edit terrain permission is granted to them by the owner
or they own the land themselves. The second method is uploading a grayscale height map (or height eld)
image le specically created to generate terrain on your region. Please note the second method for terra-
forming is only available to owners of the land; estate managers and land renters will be locked out of that
menu on the viewer.
5.2.1 imporTanT seTTings and land Tools in The firesTorm VieWer
Before you start terraforming on your land, and if that land is accessible to the public, there is one important
detail to check in the About Land menu. In the Firestorm Viewer, in the World tab/About Land/Options
section, there is a set of check boxes under “Allow other residents to:,” and you want to make sure the box
next to “Edit Terrain” is left unchecked (see Figure5.3). If you leave it checked, other residents of your world
will be able to alter your terrain and possibly ruin your carefully built landscape.
There are three basic menus you will need to know about when you are doing terraforming: the Land
Tools in the Build menu, the About Land tools, and the Estate/Region tools.
Let’s start by looking at the Land Tools in the Build menu. This method is useful for terraforming a land
area or parcel that is under one Region in size (less than 256 meters square). You can see the Land Tools by
opening your Build menu and selecting the tiny bulldozer icon on the top right. Let’s go through them one by
one (see Figure5.4 for images of this).
76 Virtual World Design
Fantastic Landscapes
Nebadon Izumi - Oni Kenkon Creations Tower on the OS Grid
Hiro Protagonist - Shambala on the OS Grid
Mac Kanashimi - Scripted Fractal Landscape in Second Life, LEA 27
FIGURE 5.2 (See color insert) Screen shots of amazing landscapes created for OpenSim and Second Life. Notice
how they can vary in composition, with the usage of outlying mountain meshes (top image), composite terraforming that
combines many regions into a whole large structure (middle image) and the creation of a landscape made from scripted
objects (bottom image).
77Virtual Terrain and Designing Landscapes
1. On the top line of the open Build menu, you will see ve icons; the last one is a tiny bulldozer. That
should be highlighted, indicating that you have activated the Land Tools.
2. Below that, it says “Click and Drag to Select Land.” What this means is that when you pick the radio
button next to Select Land on the list, you can select portions of the terrain to terraform.
Using this option is like selecting a mask for creating a stencil effect. Just as your brush will only
paint the areas open in a stencil mask, the selected area on the terrain will be the only part affected
by the Land Tools (e.g., atten, raise, lower, etc.). When your terraform work is done on the selected
terrain, you can use the smooth button to blend into the adjacent land.
3. Below the Select Land button are the six land editors: Flatten, Raise, Lower, Smooth, Roughen, and
Revert. With the exception of Revert, the names clearly describe the effect each editor will have on
your terrain.
Note: Revert is a special editing tool, and it is tied in to one of the features available to you if you
are the owner of the region or estate. In the top bar, under the World tab, there is Region Details,
which will bring up the Region/Estate menu. On that menu, under the Terrain tab near the bottom,
is the Bake Terrain button. By “baking” the terrain, you set the terraforming heights on the region
as a baseline conguration. If you want to experiment with new changes in your terrain and then
return to the baked conguration, you can do that by using the Revert tool.
4. Back in the Land Editing menu, next to the Edit tools are slider bars for your bulldozer. The Size
button on the slider affects the size of the patch moved by the bulldozer to let you work in large
FIGURE 5.3 Screen grab from OpenSim showing the About Land/Options menu for securing terraforming rights.
It’svery important to turn off the terraforming option for other users (see circled box on menu image), in order to
preserve your terrain.
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