Terrain Data Save (height field only)

Unity Engine
1

Is there a good way to save only the height field values of a Unity Terrain? My goal is to save the values into an XML file and read them back in to create the same terrain.

Any suggestions?

2

Terrain.terrainData has a GetHeights() method that returns a float array. With that, you can export it out to absolutely anything you want.

3

That would be kind of slow and very inefficient, and pointless since you don’t need the heightmap numbers to be human-readable. It would be better to save the binary values…GetHeights() returns a 2D float array, which is a bit unfortunate since the actual values as used by the terrain engine are 0-65535, so really it should return a 2D ushort array. However it’s simple to convert the float values to ushorts, and a ushort is 2 bytes. Therefore you can convert each ushort to 2 bytes in a byte[ ] array and write that out with System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes, and use ReadAllBytes to read the file and reverse the process to create a 2D float array that you’d use with SetHeights. This would make the file far smaller and quite a bit quicker than parsing zillions of XML entries.

–Eric

4

Thanks to you both. I will look into both of these right away.