Megaregions and terrain raw files
Hello Friday, it’s me.
When I was small, there was a game I used to play with myself. I think I got the idea from some book I was reading. It was quite simple, you just took a picture, preferably a landscape scenery or something the like, and imagined being in it, walking around, and imagining what would be beyond the things visible on the picture. It was quite some Alice-in-wonderlandish experience, and one that stayed with me.
Much later, I discovered the same fascination when I was playing with Terragen. Terragen was actually my entry into the fabulous world of 3D creation software, and I still have my first Terragen render around. It was simple, but evocative, in my eyes. I was curious about what was beyond these hills. I wanted to step right inside the scene and wander there.
Terrain in Second Life was very limited. For those lucky enough to afford their own private region, the world ended at 256 meters length and width. Not a lot of room to wander around, though I saw people do amazing things even with that little space. Yet now, with OpenSim around, we finally have the capabilities, each of us, to easily and cheaply make our world as big as we would like it to be. Megaregions being just the next logical step in that direction.
And so, I’ve been playing with Terragen again lately, and wrote a few tutorials on how to create single region and megaregion files for OpenSim with it. And for those, who don’t like making their own, here are some terrain files for a 9-region and 4-region square (more can be found at TGIB):
Mountain range.zip (9 regions)
Mountain lake.zip (4 regions)
Maybe now it’s time to step back into the picture and finish it.
Until next, Friday.
