SL Video: "Terrain Model of the Bellisseria Continent in Second Life (January 2024)"

 

 

(click here if the video does not play)

From Eric Mondrain on January 20, "A terrain model I made showing Second Life’s Bellisseria continent in all its topographic glory, with a total of 2,541 regions as of January 20, 2024 (counting “Sandbox Bellisseria” and the Welcome Hub regions as well, just for good measure). [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...] I gathered each region’s elevation data at half-meter X and Y intervals using an interconnected set of LSL scripts, feeding that data to my computer via a series of HTTP requests, then (re)constructed and textured the terrain model(s) in Blender using its incredibly powerful Python API [https://docs.blender.org/api/current/...]. The textures here can be downloaded individually from Second Life’s official map servers [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...]. Note: It took my revised scripts a little over 18 hours to gather the elevation data for the entire continent (compared to the 190-ish hours that it probably would have taken when I first started this terrain modeling project, before I optimized the process). At the original level of detail, Bellisseria’s topography would be over 1.3 billion triangles; for the purposes of this video (and to prevent my laptop from exploding), I decimated each region’s mesh so that the model in Blender totaled only about 13 million triangles instead."