Land Paint
Land paint is an advanced feature designed to do the math for you when creating custom textures. This mode will not do anything by itself. It only adjusts the scanners textures and calculates document size and clipping areas for you.
Use of a 3rd party graphics program is required to create custom textures and no support will be given for land paint or use of graphics creation software. You are on your own, sorry. |
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Choosing A Land Paint Resolution
When land paint is used you will be asked to select a resolution to use. The resolutions are in X meters per 1000 pixels.
The resolutions listed are the only ones which divide evenly into 1000 pixels. This means the values generated by Land Paint will be whole numbers. This is very important for accuracy.
The resolution you choose needs to be equal to or bigger than your largest scan area dimension so there are no texture repeats.
For instance if your largest scan dimension is 26m wide then you would need to choose a resolution above 26m per 1000 pixels.
I would recomend using between 20-25m scan aeras with 25/1000 resolution for the best looking results. |
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Understanding The Web Page
Once a resolution is selected the scanner will give you a link to a web page which will calculate the numbers you need for you. The web page will give you 3 types of information.
Document Size
This is the size of the document. You will scale the background image to this document size after setting up the background.
Background Size
The background size is the size of document needed to generate a background texture that matches the existing sim texture.
This is done so that you do not need to use alpha textures. Instead you create a perfect match of the land on your sim which you then paint over creating a texture of your choice. This lets the unpainted parts blend seamlessly in with the background.
To set this up, first you must save a copy of the sims background texture. This is usually one of the textures in the library which can be saved by copying them to your inventory opening them and saving them as a .tga file via the file menu or directly from the image in newer viewers.
After this is done you create a new graphics document in the size specified by the background size on the web page. This size will allow for an even number of 512x512 textures to be tlied accross it. Apply the texture you saved accross this background image.
Once the textures are applied flatten the document and resize the whole thing to the size specified by the document size on the website. This is the final document size for your land painting. Scaling the background in such a way ensures it scales and lines up properly later on.
Clipping Areas
Once the background has been set up and you have painted your custom texture, the clipping areas will tell you where to cut/paste from on the master texture for each scan area.
Each clipping area is 1024x1024 pixels. The reason the resolution is set in X meters per 1000 pixels is because an overlap of 12 pixels on either side of the texture is auto calculated in.
This overlap prevents seams from forming in the textures when viewed at long distances to vastly improve asthetics.
Each clipping area has 3 [X,Y] values.
The center value is the center of the 1024x1024 clipping area.
The NW value is upper left corner of the clipping area.
The SE value is the lower right corner of the clipping area.
These values specify precisely where on the graphics document to copy/paste from. You need to be 100% accurate when you clip from these areas to achieve the proper end results. |
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Using Land Paint
So the whole process of using Land Paint goes as follows:
1. Setup your scanners. Lock, upload and build the land prims. if you dont know how to do this you shouldnt be trying to land paint yet anyways lol please read the quickstart guide first.
2. Click any land prim and select [Land Paint] then choose a resolution that is equal or greater than your biggest scan area.
3. Go to the land paint website it gives you and set up a document the size of the background image.
4. Set up the background image using the process described in the section above. Apply your sim texture to it then flatten and resize the image to the final document size.
5. Paint whatever texture you would like over the background. this is where you create your custom texture.
6. Once you are all done painting, save and flatten the image.
7. Copy a 1024x1024 section from the image for each specificed clipping area on the website. Save each copied area to a new file.
8. Upload the saved image files to SL and apply them. |
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