3d Objects in Canvas Overlay

Unity Engine
1

I am working on a simple board game. I have the game working, player pieces moving around a board,etc. What i wanted to do was add dice (a 3d gameobject) to the canvas that i could lock in the top-right corner so a player could click on the dice which then spins and stops on a number. i have the dice working in my scene view but i can’t figure out how to lock it in on the screen. I have several cameras that move around as players move so i can’t child it to a camera.

So, any suggestions? Best i can think of is to have several dice, one attached to each camera, but that doesn’t seem right. It seems like i should be able to put it in the top right corner of a screen overlay canvas, but it doesn’t show up.

I’m sure this is something really simple, thanks for the help.

James

2

3d objects don’t work in overlay. You’ll have to use screen space camera canvas. You could attach it to the canvas and have the canvas switch cameras, but I don’t know how often you would need to do that. There is probably a better way.

3

This part is a bit unclear to me – what’s stopping you from attaching a camera to a die? And/or zoom in/out or play with the FOV to have all dice in view? Then either use the camera viewport settings to render to a portion of a screen, or use a RenderTexture which you can then use in the screen overlay as a RawImage?

1 Like
4

I could do the zoom in/out thing, its just not what i initially wanted to do, but may be what i go with. Will have to look into camera viewport settings and figure out how to render to a portion of the screen. Will also look into RenderTexture as RawImage. Not sure what this is but if its just an image i dont think the spinning dice animation would work. These 2 things i know nothing about. Any sample code/pseudocode you may have or suggestions for a decent tutorial would be greatly appreciated.if not im sure i can figure it out, just takes me a while

Im a total noob at this point, this is only the 3rd game i have worked on from scratch, so trying to learn as i go.

Thanks for the suggestion guys.

James

5

There’s a nice RenderTexture tutorial video here:

Bonus: The camera is attached to a cube (can think of it as a die), so it might come pretty close to what you’re looking for?

6

awesome, thanks Pete!