The Input Settings determine the terrain or terrain group that you are going to slice, the region to slice, as well as some other critical details about the input terrain or group.
The slice method determine whether you are slicing a single terrain or a terrain group. Choose Slice Single Terrain in order to slice a single Unity Terrain, or Slice Terrain Group to slice a Terrain Group.
When slicing a terrain group, you must slice the entire area of each terrain in the group. This is to ensure that the resulting slices line up with each other in order to form a new terrain group.
Represents the terrain prefab that you would like to slice (Terrain To Slice), or one of the Terrain from the Terrain Group you would like to slice (Any Terrain From Group). A prefab is required in order to ensure that the reference to the object will not be lost when closing the Unity Editor or taking other actions that cause a script recompilation.
If you have a single Terrain that only exists within a scene, simply drag and drop the game object onto a folder in your Project Hierarchy to make it into a Prefab. If you have a group of terrain in the scene, you can use the Prefab Creator tool (Assets - > Deep Space Labs -> Core -> Open Prefab Creator) to batch convert the scene objects into prefabs.
You can also drag and drop an instance of a prefab that exist in the Scene, however when doing so the Slicer will automatically find and utilize the corresponding prefab asset that is associated with the instance. The instance itself will not be used.
--Special Note--
Prior to Update 1.2.0, the Terrain component needed to be directly on the Prefab Instance or Source Prefab Asset that you dragged to this field. This restriction no longer exists, so the terrain component can be either directly on the prefab instance/source prefab asset, or on one of its children. Do note, however, that even if the terrain component is on a child, the output slices will consist of a single game object (without children) with a Terrain component.
For SAM Users! If you are attempting to slice a prefab group created using the World Designer Tool's Assignmnet Operation, it's recommended that the group be created after upgrading your SAM project to 1.4.0. Prior to this update, the prefab position data was not set correctly, so when slicing, the output slice positions would not be set correctly. This is especially a concern if using a Fixed World.
When this option is disabled, the Slicer will use the position of the corresponding prefab asset (or assets for a terrain group) to position generated slices. This position may be different than the prefab instance(s) in the scene. If you would like to use the position of the prefab instance(s) instead, enable this option.
--Upgrade Note--
This is a new setting only available with Terra Slicer.
The Input Naming Convention is used only when slicing a Terrain Group. It controls how the Slicer tool generates the prefab asset names it uses to search for prefab assets from the Terrain Group. It is crucial that this is configured correctly, or else the slicing operation will fail due to not being able to find the terrain prefabs from the group, though note that in most cases, you can leave the field blank in order to force the Slicer to use the Default Naming Convention. For more information on Naming Convention assets, please take a look at the Naming Convention Section within the Miscellaneous Chapter.
--Special Note--
When using Terrain components that are on child objects of the prefab source asset, note that the Slicer will search for prefabs according to the parent prefab you provide to the Any Terrain From Group field, not the child game object that has the Terrain component (in fact, the naming of the child object does not matter at all).
Pressing this button will add an instance of the prefab you assigned to the Terrain To Slice/Any Terrain From Group field to the scene. This is useful for visualizing the size of the slices that will be created as well as for visualizing which area(s) will be sliced when not slicing the entire source terrain (only available when slicing a single terrain).
When slicing a terrain group, you can specify the range of terrain from the group to slice. This is incredibly useful if you have a group with hundreds of terrain, as it allows you to re-slice a subset of the group if you make changes to that subsets source terrain in the future.
The naming of the generated slices is based on the group as a whole rather than the subset you are slicing. For instance, if you set First Row/Column to 2/2 and perform a 2x2 slice (2 rows of slices/2 columns of slices per each terrain in the group), the first generated terrain slice for the subset will have a row value of 3 and column value of 3, rather than a row value of 1 and column value of 1. This ensures that when you perform slicing operations on subsets, the generated slices do not overwrite generated slices from other slicing operations that were performed on other subsets.
Finally, note that with Update 1.2.0, the Slicer will now simply skip over missing prefabs from the group rather than throw an exception.
When slicing a terrain group, you can specify a fixed Layer value if your prefab group names include a layer value. This is most common if you used our other product SAM (The Streamable Assets Manager) to generate the prefab group.
To do so, you will first need to enable the Use 3D Format option, which tells the Slicer to generate names that include a Layer value. This also tells the Slicer to use the 3D Default Naming Convention when no Input Naming Convention is provided.
When using the 3D Format, all output assets (slice prefabs, Terrain Data, and Terrain Layers) will also utilize the Layer value.
Since you can only input a single Layer value, if you have a prefab group that includes terrain from multiple Layers, you will need to perform separate slicing operations for each layer!
This option is only available when slicing a partial area of a single terrain.
It adds a special script to the source terrain that enables you to generate a hole which perfectly covers the area that was sliced.
This can be used to create interesting in game effects.
--Upgrade Note--
This is a new setting only available with Terra Slicer.