Duplicating Terrain

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

We’re working on a project that requires that we visit the same area at different times of day under different weather conditions. Since there’s no scripting access to things like wind speed and grass tint (that I could find in the docs, at least), it looks like we have to duplicate the terrain for every scene at a different time slice. Unfortunately, the way Unity is designed to handle the terrain is making it difficult to make deep copies of the terrain so we can alter those two things on a per-scene basis. I have tried:

  • Changing these parameters via scripting. There isn’t any access that I can find.
  • Duplicating the terrain “prefab” in the project view. This approach creates a shallow copy.
  • Exporting the heightmap and importing it to a new terrain. Doing so doesn’t retain any of the detail placement or splat maps, and there does not appear to be a way to copy those without using undocumented features (per this thread).
    Does anyone know any other ways to get a deep copy of the terrain so we can make some modifications to these features?
2

I would actually create a package containing the terrain game object + its materials and the used foliage.

with “select dependencies” that should normally work pretty well.

3

Sorry, forgot to mention that I had tried something along those lines. I can’t import the package because those assets already exist in the project. I may be missing something about your suggestion, which is very likely.

4

hmm ok

we can naturally always do the cheapo XYZ one: just dublicate the scene file itself

5

I hadn’t considered that option, but it still only makes a shallow copy of the terrain data, sadly.