World Map Iconography
World Map Icons, Airfitti, Sky Map Icons, World Map Art, World Map Billboards, etc is a way of generating a desired picture or icon on the World Map.
Usecases can be for signage, art, landmarking, community features, advertising and more.
- Highlighting community features such as Airports, GTFO, etc
- Making World Map more useful to potential visitors/onlookers or services offered
- Artistic reasons
- Clearly marking roads and infrastructure
- Advertising land rentals/sales
How the World Map Works
The way these are made is by taking into account the characteristics of how the World Map works:
- Maximum height that objects can be seen is 400.005m
- Does not render textures — you can't put a picture on a large prim and call it a day
- Does render the tint color of a prim
- Does not properly render meshes — they are rendered as a hexagonal/spherical shape
- Renders prims at lowest level of detail
- Renders a region as a 256px x 256px picture — whereas a region is 256m x 256m, therefore one meter is one pixel
- Has had some changes made to hide overly-large megaprims used for voidscapes/sim surrounds from obscuring the regions on the World Map
- Region's picture on the World Map can update about once a day
Making It
Therefore to construct a world map icon/art/billboard it needs to be constructed out of prim geometry.
It is recommended to:
- Set the prims to phantom to avoid interfering with air travel
- Set any unintended faces not directly visible from above to the world map to 100% transparent (such as bottom of the icon/art to avoid seeing it when looking up)
- When constructing with prims to do it in LOD 0 (set Object LOD Factor to lowest) to observe how the world map will see the prims
Easy Way
An easy technique to build a specific billboard when you have a picture/photo, is to put the picture on a large prim and then reconstruct the shape out of prims above it.
Pixel Perfect
A more tedious and land impact intensive but exact method is to use a 1m x 1m prim for each pixel, but this allows for full control, even allowing recreating a low resolution photo or a piece of pixel art.
This can also be automated with scripting, which offers the opportunity to change the picture regularly throughout the week or a month.