Resource Helper

Overview

The resource helper is a small but handy tool to mass edit terrain resources (Terrain Layers, Trees, Terrain Details). It is not a spawner tool that places resources on your terrain, but it works with the resource prototype setup on the terrain. The "prototypes" are the assets that you can see in the terrain inspector in the paint/tree/detail tabs when the terrain is selected:



The resource helper can do three things:

1. Completely strip off the resources from the terrains in your scene. (Note that stripping off resources also removes all instances from the terrain, if you e.g. remove a birch tree prototype from the tree tab, it will also disappear from the terrain in the scene completely.)
2. Copy the resource setup from one "source" terrain to all other terrains in the scene. 
3. Convert Trees to full Game Objects

There are various reasons why you would want to use the resource helper tool, for example:

• You experimented a lot with different textures, trees, etc. across your terrains. Over time those terrains accumulated a lot of unused resource prototypes that you want to remove to start with a clean slate.
• You created one "master" terrain that contains the exact (order of) prototypes that you want, and you want to copy this setup over to all other terrains.
• Gaia usually tries to avoid to add additional resource prototypes on the terrain during a spawn, unless that prototype is really required on that terrain. This is done for performance reasons. In some cases you might prefer though that each terrain has the exact same resources in the same order applied to it, e.g. when using scripts or 3rd party assets where the order of the resources on the terrain matters.
• You want to utilize full game objects as trees, e.g. because you want to attach scripts to them.

Starting the Tool

You can open the resource helper tool either from the Advanced Tab in the Gaia Manager:



Or you can find a shortcut to this tool in every Gaia spawner in the advanced panel:



The tool starts as separate Editor Window:

Usage

Using the tool is pretty simple, select the operation you want to perform, and select the options for this operation, and click the button. The operations are:

Remove Resources

Removes the selected prototypes from the terrain. Note that you can either delete from all terrains (including currently unloaded ones, if your scene uses terrain loading) or from a specific terrain only.

Copy Resources



Select a source terrain whose resource setup you want to copy, and select which resources and whether you want to apply this resource setup to all terrains, or a single specific terrain only)

Trees to Game Objects

Allows you to automatically convert terrain trees to regular Game Objects. You can choose whether you want the original trees to be removed from the terrain or not.