A "roundtrip" is when you rebuild in Gaea and then have to re-import (or relink) the terrain, masks, bitmaps, and other outputs in your DCC because the file paths changed.

The problem

If your Build Destination uses an incremental pattern like [+++], Gaea creates a new output folder for every build. That preserves history, but it also changes the asset paths every time - so your materials and file references in your CG application break and must be updated.

If you use a fixed (static) output path instead, your links stay valid - but each build overwrites the last one, so you lose per-build history.

The solution

Gaea 2 includes an option in Build Options (Build tab) called Maintain a static folder with the latest copy.

Enable it while still using an incremental destination pattern like [+++]:

• Gaea continues to write each build into its own numbered folder (so you keep every build).
• Gaea also copies the newest build into a sibling folder named Latest.

Point your DCC file links to the Latest folder. Your references stay stable across rebuilds, while you still retain archived outputs per build.

Optional: enable Copy the .terrain file to the build folder to store an exact snapshot of the terrain file used for each build. This is useful for tracking changes across iterations and rolling back to a specific version.

This is what a typical folder structure would look like in this scenario.

c:\Gaea\Builds\Sample\
├── 001\
│   ├── Erosion2.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Deposits.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Flow.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Wear.exr
│   ├── report.json
│   ├── report.txt
│   └── Sample.terrain
├── 002\
│   ├── Erosion2.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Deposits.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Flow.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Wear.exr
│   ├── report.json
│   ├── report.txt
│   └── Sample.terrain
├── 003\
│   ├── Erosion2.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Deposits.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Flow.exr
│   ├── Erosion2_Wear.exr
│   ├── report.json
│   ├── report.txt
│   └── Sample.terrain
└── Latest\
    ├── Erosion2.exr
    ├── Erosion2_Deposits.exr
    ├── Erosion2_Flow.exr
    ├── Erosion2_Wear.exr
    └── Sample.terrain