Setting up Opensim on a USB key is a great experience. Looking out with your avatar on a vast expanse of 4 regions is like peering at a huge blank canvas waiting for your imagination.
A Tabula Rasa in the palm of your hand.
But if you feel daunted by the need to terraform many acres of land, remember that you can easily upload terrain files.
I recently found a wonderful 4-sim megaregion terrain that is freely available and looks fantastic. You can find a copy here. I’ll also explain how to quickly set it up.
How to quickly set up a 4-sim megaregion terrain.
Once you unzip the file, you’ll find 4 RAW files. ne.raw, nw.raw, se.raw, and sw.raw.
Copy the files to the root directory of your USB key.
Start your Opensim, log in with your avatar, and open the World Map so you can see your 4 regions and their names.
Go to the Opensim console and enter the following commands:
- change region <the name of your NorthEast region>
- terrain load /ne.raw
- change region <the name of your NorthWest region>
- terrain load /nw.raw
- change region <the name of your SouthEast region>
- terrain load /se.raw
- change region <the name of your SouthWest region>
- terrain load /sw.raw
If you get an error, you probably have the wrong directory path to your .raw files. Be sure they are in the root directory of your USB key.
Have fun watching the terrains load from inworld. It’s magical.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 
Hi, thanks for the link. I hope the terrain files will be useful for you and the readers. They’re licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, so nobody needs to worry about sharing, uploading and using them. Personally, I’m very glad you found your way to OpenSim, and hope that it will make others aware of the greater metaverse that is to come.
Greetings,
V
Hi Vanish. My pleasure. Your blog is a great place to learn more about how to create excellent terrain maps and textures. I’ve found it extremely helpful. Thanks again for sharing your expertise.
For companies or schools building campuses, a quick and easy alternative is to go into the OpenSim console and type:
SET TERRAIN FILL 21
This gives you a completely flat region, all one meter above water level. You can quickly create water features by lowering land slightly just where you need them.
Otherwise, leave everything else flat. This makes it very easy to put down buildings and move them around, and create and move paths, roads and other landscape features.
Building on a slope is always challenging — there’s a reason real-world construction companies usually start by leveling the area where they’re going to build!
Having a flat terrain also makes it easy to join regions together — you never have to worry about edges not lining up right.
Land is cheap in OpenSim, so could create beaches on the sides of otherwise-empty water regions and just drop them in whenever you need them. If someone hasn’t created these OAR files yet, I might give this a shot… you’d need four with land on one side, four with land on two adjacent sides, and two with land on opposite sides, four with land on three sides, and one with land on all four sides…
Then add crashing waves, some rocks, fish, sailing boats and a lighthouse…
Mmmmmm….
— Maria
@Maria Korolov
typing SET TERRAIN FILL 21 or SET TERRAIN FILL21 at the prompt in the Open Sim Console when running on USB I get Invalid Command.
try “terrain fill 21”
Running OpenSim on my USB and trying out different terrains is perhaps the worst thing I have ever done here in my office. Now instead of answering my email or reviewing the work of my employees, I have this little window on the second monitor that I keep sneaking into to build stuff that will end up in my store in SL. Talk about sucking the life out of my day job…wow.
That’s a great example of how SL and OpenSim fit together in an ecosystem. Use a standalone OpenSim as your portable workshop to build content that you import and sell in your business in SL. I love it.
Got to try this! Possible issue. Will this work using a MAC, if not, then what?
Sorry, the applications you need to run only work on a PC. There may be a Mac solution, but I have no experience with that.
Pity there are no Mac solutions 😦
Actually, I’m running OpenSim on a Mac and it works just peachy. I wrote a “quick and dirty” introduction on my approach, but there are many more resources out there on how to set it up and get it running.
Excellent. Thanks for sharing that.
Hi everyone, running OSGrid on MacOS, i just did the recommended
terrain fill 21
Worked for me 😀