Using L3DT

About L3DT

L3DT can be used to generate terrains. The program runs natively under Windows, and can be run under Linux using the Wine compatibility layer(Only the development version!).

Quick intro on creating a terrain with L3DT

To create a terrain for a single region:

1. Create a NEW MAP by clicking on that icon in the title bar.
2. Highlight Design/Inflate, and click Next.
3. Make the size X=4, y=4. This will give you a 256x256 terrain, the same size as a region. Click Next.
4. Play with the sliders in the parameters window. You can just leave the defaults to start with. Click Next.
5. Check Design Map, and click OK.
6. Now click the CALC icon in the menu bar, then click OK.
7. You now have your terrain. If you don't like it, start over and play with the settings.
8. To save it: File=>Export=>Export Map.
9. Highlight Heightfield, and then click OK.
10. Choose File Format RAW, then click the Options button.
11. Double click "Mode", and select "float (meters)", then click OK, and OK again.
12. Name the file whatever you want, and click OK to save it.

• • • UPDATE New Terrain system requires L3DT export files to have a file extension of .r32 *IMPORTANT*

• • • 2008.11.05 Update: With L3DT Standard Version 2.6, at the "Heightfield Size (2/5)" screen (step 3 above), you need to enter 256x256 and set the Horiz. scale to 1. The next screen "Design map size (3/5)" take the defaults. Now you are at step 4, above.

• • • 2008.11.05 Update: when exporting the raw file (step 11 above), chose 32-bit floating-point (meters)

To load the terrain into opensim:

Assume your file is called "terrain.r32".At the region console, type:

terrain load terrain.r32

You now have your new terrain! You can at this point use the terrain add, terrain scale, or terrain multiply to rescale it to your liking.

Version 2.7

Using version 2.7, (development as at 2009-02-14) the export process is simpler, in that you only need to choose a file type of "R32" and enter a filename.

Using your new terrain files =

You can now also create terrains in some multiple of 256x256 to load to multiple regions at one time with the terrain load-tile command.

For example, if you create a 768x768 terrain.r32 file, you can load it to a set of 9 regions centred on 1000,1000 as follows:

terrain load-tile terrain.r32 3 3 999 999

The terrain generated by L3DT seems to use 0 as sea level (perhaps not surprising :-) but OpenSimulator uses 20 for the sea level, so after you have loaded your terrain you will probably want to adjust it's elevation:

terrain elevate 20

See: http://opensimulator.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/new-terrain-commands/ for some more information.