AFAIK, the “usual” way to add an HUD in a render would be to lay it on a shadeless plane, just in front of the camera.
This time I’m working on a project where the camera is scripted to pan and zoom in order to follow certain events in specific areas on a map (in an extremely unpredictable way because it’s database-driven. Follow this link for details).
Of course, panning isn’t a problem but zooming is: by shrinking lens angle, you’re excluding areas of your HUD from view frustum.
I already patched this in a not-so-elegant way: an IPO driver rescales the plane based on camera’s lens angle (you know, those handy trigonometric functions…).
I HATE hacks like the one I employed,
so here I am begging for a better idea ^^
Put all your HUD elements in a separate Scene and use a separate camera, then combine the 2 Scenes in the Compositor. That’s how the HUD effects in the later part of this video were done (download & run the full-size AVI for a better rendition of the HUD part).
Thank you very much, that works rather well (with some limitations, however: i.e.: to get scene-bound objects interact with hud-bound ones, such as a line connecting an on-hud item description with the item itself while both the camera and the target may be moving, there’s a big deal of scripting involved…)
Your original post didn’t mention the interactive part, but it’s very interesting that you found a way to accomplish that. Kudos! When you get your project finished I think it’d be worth documenting your methods, sounds like a very useful technique for some kinds of animation.
