Testing the New Terrain Editor

One of the most eagerly-awaited new features of the September 8th Sansar software release was the ability to use an interactive Terrain Editor to sculpt land, much as you can do in Second Life! Today I tested this feature out, and despite a few bugs it worked well.

Here’s what the Terrain Editor looks like in Sculpt mode, where you can create hills and valleys:

The smallest size of land that you can sculpt at one time is 32 by 32 metres square, and the largest is 256 by 256 metres. You can set the size of your sculpting tool anywhere from 1 up to 32. You can also set the strength, hardness, and noise of your sculpting. All of these features are described fully in the Terrain Editor documentation.

It’s possible to soften or sharpen the peaks and valleys you create, and even flatten it all out if you want to start over! Here’s what I got after only a few minutes of sculpting. You can see where I smoothed out one of the hills. You can also “paint” the land using one of the preset textures (stone, grass, soil, etc.). You cannot yet add your own textures, but that feature is promised for a future release.

Everything is not yet perfect. Using the Terrain Editor did crash the Sansar software for me three times in a row, and I did come across a screen display problem when in Paint mode. I reported these bugs to the Bug Reports section of the Sansar Community website. This sort of thing is to be expected when beta testing software. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the Terrain Editor! It is a powerful new tool for Sansar creators.

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