is there a way to put a view ( maybe from a camera ) to a rendered texture?
i need to somehow emulate portal warps, that would be a face of a sector mesh being a portal to another sector mesh, so what you see when seeing thru the faces is the other view.
Would be GREAT if that could be done from GUI and python
Yes, there are several ways depending what you want.
If you are making an animation, where the portal view will be the same all the time, then the easiest way is to render that view as an avi and use the avi as an animated texture assigned to the particular face(s) of the portal object. Import it like any other image texture, but click the “movie” button.
If you are looking for a more dynamic way of doing this, you could use env mapping, but specify an empty as the camera object and move it to the other view.
The first has the speed advantage. The Envmap needs to render 6 views of the first scene, but 5 of them will go unused, since your face has only 1 side of interest. It also allows you to render the other view in another scene or even another .blend file.
The env map will, however, automatically update for changes in the first scene. (if you use the “anim” button).
I’m not sure how well env maps are supported in real-time mode, so YMMV.
Create 2 cameras. Parent the portal view camera to the main view camera then you won’t have to wory about the 6 render syndrome. the portal camera will move the same length as the main camera and cut down on render time too. I haven’t tried this but i just had a brain storm and thought I’d send you the Idea. Not many people use more than one camera… mabey It’s cause they don’t know how to switch…
Food for thought though.
some 3D engines rely on the portal system to sorting polygons, that is, 3D world is separated in sector meshes, and some of the faces on the meshes are portal to other sector meshes ( in some other world space coordinates ). The result of this is that, when you view to this faces, what you see is like the face is a hole and behind that hole is the sector mesh where the portal points to.
what i would like is to being able to do this on the 3D view