How can I pre-load and render multiple scenes?

I am currently porting an XNA project to Unity and have some questions. I have browsed around alot to find an answer and allthough there have been questions like this the answers are different and the original posters seem to find other ways.

First up: Is it possible to preload a scene and change on will (e.g. keypress)? I have tried LoadLevelAsync but as you know it switches scenes as soon as the load is complete. For structural purposes I would like to seperate the scenes and not use different layers and/or offseting objects in a single scene.

Secondly: Is there a way to render a scene to texture and use that in another scene? A use case for this, combined with my first question, would be to pre-load a scene, wait for a keypress, render it to a texture and put it into the original scene onto a quad. Then, when close enough to the quad, I would like to switch scenes alltogether.

Sorry for writing half an essay and posting something similar to other questions but my current XNA project uses these features and I’m sure it’s possible to do in some way in Unity aswell, I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Thank you for your time.

You cannot have multiple independent scenes loaded at once per se. You can load additively, which will load stuff without clearing out your existing scene tho. One way most games deal with loading and unloading scenes with more control is to make sure each scene has all of its contents parented to a single root. Then “unloading” a scene is just a matter of destroying that root object.

In theory you could use a RenderTexture to store an image from some camera. In the above structure you could additively load a scene and then render only it (buy deactivating everything else) to a RenderTexture. Then that can be positioned somewhere logical in 3D space. Getting all that wired together is possible, but far from trivial.