How to avoid permanent changes to terrain

Scene & World Building Terrain
1

Hey,

I’m writing some procedurally generated things… and adding trees to terrain and so on in runtime.

Now… all the stuff I do to terrains while in runtime seems to “stick” permanently to the terrain object, which is ok when deployed, since I suppose you aren’t saving the data anyway… but while developing in the editor it’s VERY annoying.

Is there a way to avoid this? What if I Instantiate() the terrain stuff at start… will a new terrain data spawn in my assets?

2

Finally got it to work… you can use this script before doing anything procedural to your terrains (note there’s some stuff here specific to my project, like “Terrain” layer):

	private void CloneTerrain(Terrain t) {
		TerrainData dataClone = Instantiate(t.terrainData) as TerrainData;
		Debug.Log("dataClone has name " + dataClone.name);
		GameObject newTerrainObj = Terrain.CreateTerrainGameObject(dataClone);
		newTerrainObj.layer = LayerMask.NameToLayer("Terrain");
		newTerrainObj.transform.position = t.transform.position;
		newTerrainObj.transform.rotation = t.transform.rotation;
		Terrain newTerrain = newTerrainObj.GetComponent(typeof(Terrain)) as Terrain;

		newTerrain.treeDistance = t.treeDistance;
		newTerrain.treeBillboardDistance = t.treeBillboardDistance;
		newTerrain.treeCrossFadeLength = t.treeCrossFadeLength;
		newTerrain.treeMaximumFullLODCount = t.treeMaximumFullLODCount;
		newTerrain.detailObjectDistance = t.detailObjectDistance;
		newTerrain.heightmapPixelError = t.heightmapPixelError;
		newTerrain.heightmapMaximumLOD = t.heightmapMaximumLOD;
		newTerrain.basemapDistance = t.basemapDistance;
		newTerrain.lighting = t.lighting;
		newTerrain.castShadows = t.castShadows;
	}

Note that setting the terrainData on a Terrain did not seem to work - it kept its old terrain data in the inspector.