Camera delayed update or image hold

Questions & Answers
1

Hi all,

I’m trying to create a sort of rotoscopic video effect, making one of the scene cameras capture its video feed only at predetermined intervals.

Simply put, I need to make it so that the camera ‘takes a snapshot’ and maintains that snapshot until a ‘new snapshot’ is taken. I’ve never seen or read about this, and I hope that somebody can share their ideas on the subject, especially if they don’t revolve around getpixels and setpixels since scene performance is an issue.

I’m just hoping that there’s some way to ‘disable’ a camera and make it keep its last render, until it’s ‘enabled’ again. By default, if you disable a camera it takes its last video feed away with it.

2

This is a bit of a guess, but in Unity Pro you can render to texture, in which case disabling the camera would presumably just stop updating the texture and you can keep it as long as you want before rendering to it again. Someone with Unity Pro would have to confirm that…

I think it’ll be very difficult in Unity Free though. You could fudge the game time, pausing the game for 0.5 seconds, allowing it to run for one frame, then pausing it again. But that would slow down the gameworld too, and simulating long time periods in one frame is going to cause problems, especially if you’re using physics.