young marsh
I'd like to apply a shader across a whole canvas. So far the method I've been using involves aiming a camera at the canvas and having it output to a render texture, which I use on a RawImage, which has the shader's material applied.
This is obviously a lot of steps and means a new camera for every canvas I want to apply my effect to. Is there any way to skip the camera/RT/RawImage step and go straight to applying the shader to the canvas?
haughty bramble
I'd like to apply a shader across a whole canvas. So far the method I've been us...
I guess that depends on what kind of effect you're going for
young marsh
I guess that depends on what kind of effect you're going for
Thanks for replying! It's a CRT effect over multiple screens
So this one, as an example, requires four cameras to be running at once, because each screen needs its own render texture (because they're angled differently, they can't share a render texture).
If I could cut the cameras out, it would help a lot with optimisation!
haughty bramble
I've often seen this done with just one camera by rendering all the elements in the same 2D space, then with mesh UVs splitting the texture into multiple different spots
young marsh
I've often seen this done with just one camera by rendering all the elements in ...
That sounds like a fantastic solution. I've never worked with mesh UVs though. Do you have any recommendations for looking into that?
haughty bramble
That sounds like a fantastic solution. I've never worked with mesh UVs though. D...
Not specifically, but it's pretty much a core pillar of 3D asset creation so there are countless resources in general
Though hard to learn without getting into 3D modeling at least a bit
Unity's ProBuilder can do it and skip the need to learn something like Blender for it
But I'm not sure if it's all that easier, and knowing Blender for tasks just like this is super handy
young marsh
The shader does have a screen warp effect where it bends towards the edges. Do you think that'd be possible to replicate using the mesh UV method?
If you can share any examples of where you've seen this done that might be helpful, but no worries if you can't remember on the spot.
haughty bramble
The shader does have a screen warp effect where it bends towards the edges. Do y...
Yes, possible
But might not be necessary when you could subdivide and bend the mesh itself
young marsh
Ohhh that's clever.
Okay, yeah. My main concern with this would be the loss of control per individual screen (eg shader effects that come from the 'top' of the screen, no longer being able to vary the shader per screen, etc) but those might be worth sacrificing for performance.
Just to absolutely rule it out, there's no way at all of applying a shader to the canvas without first going through camera --> RT? No way to convert a canvas to a texture that doesn't involve using a camera as a middle-man?
haughty bramble
Okay, yeah. My main concern with this would be the loss of control per individua...
You can vary the shader per screen because each screen can use a different material, even if they share the RT
And in that case you can remap shader effects to a specific UV region that'd normally go from corner to corner
And no practical way to skip the need for for more cameras afaik
Except this one https://agentlien.github.io/cameras/
(Not really a tutorial as it doesn't have every step detailed, just the gist of it)
Only this one comes to mind off the top of my head
The grid of screens are physically separate
And some monitors apply the film effect, some don't, while sharing the RT
Actually Ep2 improved on this
Can more clearly see the separation and different effects per monitor
Which could be achieved by applying one shader that does different effects per-UV region, or using different shaders with the same RT just as well
young marsh
That's fantastic - thank you so much!
haughty bramble
That's fantastic - thank you so much!
Additionally I think Fallout 3 and 4 are using a similar technique for pip-boy screen, not multi monitor but UI mapped to a curved mesh along with a screen effect shader
The curving could be done in the shader but with meshes it's just very simple
Shaders are the way to go if you want the curvature to have some special parallax or respond to viewing angle in specific ways though
young marsh
No I think a mesh would be ideal for it. And for hit detection you'd just use a raycast and convert the area on the mesh to the relative area on the canvas?
haughty bramble
No I think a mesh would be ideal for it. And for hit detection you'd just use a ...
If you don't have a lot of interactable UI elements that would be fine, and you can account for the curvature however you see fit too
There's probably some clever methods to map the screens to the UI in RT space (or the other way around) but I'm not sure what that would be
Probably only necessary if you have too many, or too dynamic elements to take care of manually
young marsh
We've got a lot of interactable elements, but only on some of the screens.
The bottom one in my screenshot is the only one the player really interacts with directly.
haughty bramble
If you did want to do some clever mapping of physical screens to UI, I think maybe you could translate the cursor and click coordinates from world space to the 2D UI space relative to the screens
But UI afaik uses graphics raycaster and inbuilt click events so I don't know if they allow offsetting the cursor in that way before checking for UI interaction
If you can get away with predefined clickable colliders on the screen itself, I recommend that
young marsh
Hm. It's definitely more dynamic than that unfortunately. I think it might come down to writing some custom button/interaction components and using them.