Scene with Tiled Terrains (as scenes) lost "Master Scene"

[Bill Pomidor]

Quick question; the title pretty much says it all: I've been working with a simple Gaia session where I have created a 4x2 (2048m/tile) scene that I was happy with. I populated it with numerous objects (cities/towns/etc) and matched their elevations to fit the terrain in their locations.

I needed to check a previous version of the scene (after making no Gaia/terrain changes), so I opened it up -- or tried to. The scene was simply named "CoST_v215.unity" (I had been working on CoST_v216), but when I opened "CoST_v215," I got nothing but a single terrain tile/scene (see image below).

In other words, though I tried to open "CoST_v215" I'm only loading the individual terrain scene.

For some reason, I can't find/open the main scene any more -- the one that holds my cities/towns/etc along with the full terrain (shown as 8 tiles, with scene icons beside their names in the inspector).

One thing I did differently when building this world was that I clicked (activated) "Unload Terrain Scenes." Usually I just check "Create Terrain Scenes" and leave the "Unload Terrain Scenes" box unchecked).

Now, I can't seem to open ANY of the previous versions of the scene, either; whenever I try, the same "Terrain Scene" opens up, showing just one tile and no game objects. Same result occurs when I replay the session.

Is there any way I can retrieve / restore my scene?  (I promise I'll never, ever click the "unload terrain scenes" option again!) 

[Bill Pomidor]

Managed to find a version of my world objects, so the cities etc are at least in-scene again.  And I had made a heightmap backup in the Session Manager yesterday, so restoring the heightmap got the terrain to the correct heights for the cities. 

Unfortunately, I *don't want to use* terrain scenes (never had any problems until I started using them). After several hours spent trying to recover my scene, I'm still having trouble.

When I try to rebuild the world without terrain scenes (which brings the 8 terrains into the "master" scene), the terrains go missing again. Is there any way to rebuild the gaia world using the heightmap backup I had made?  Or a better way to reconstruct the scene/terrains mentioned in my original post?

 

[Bryan]

The terrain data would be in that session data folder. 
That would be the only way to reconnect them. 
 

[Bryan]

You could try and make a multi-terrain setup and then replay that session. 

To try and get the terrains back in one master scene. 

 

[Bill Pomidor]

Thanks, Bryan!

I've come up with a workaround that keeps Gaia's benefits while gaining the flexibility and accuracy of conventional heightmap exports -- without having to use the Scanner.  (I'm not sure why, but when I use Scanner and Stamper to export heightmaps and create stamps (of an existing terrain), it's not as accurate and consistent as when I use conventional HMP export/import)

To change my 4x2 terrain from the multi-scene setup back to a regular single-scene terrain, I first made a backup of all the heightmaps (using Terrain Toolbox), and then used the Create World tab to rebuild the 4x2 terrain with a single-scene setup (un-checked "Create Terrain Scenes").

For the actual stamping of the terrain, I left the "Stamp Image" field empty and simply hit the "Stamp" button. The stamper created the 4x2 terrain's 8 tiles as a perfectly flat rectangle. After that, I simply used the standard "Import Heightmap" tool (in Unity's terrain component) in order to create a super-accurate copy of my original terrain. I had to import the heightmaps individually, but that only took a couple of minutes (if I had a BIG world, e.g. 8x8 terrain tiles, importing the heightmaps individually would have been a pain). 

(BTW / OT: Feature suggestion -- It might be worthwhile to write a short script that imports the correct heightmaps into an array of terrain tiles, since the heightmaps would have the same position-numbers (row / column) as their targeted terrain tiles.)

Because the terrain tiles were designated as Gaia tiles, they're fully editable using the Gaia and Gena tools.  And because they're all in one scene, I don't have to worry about my "invisible terrain" issues. And most important of all, by exporting/importing heightmaps, I'm able to hand-edit the terrain tiles and then create accurate / up-to-date backups of the terrains' geometry. 😉

 

[Bryan]

Thats great! 
Thank you for the update!