Camera stacking with pixelated render texture on only one of them

Unity Engine
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Hello! Im trying to do something specific with a camera, but im unsure if I will even like the output, but I cant even figure out how to do it.

Im making a 2D game, and I had the idea to have a mixture of art styles- the main gameplay area is pixel art, but the backgrounds (which you can zoom in and out of) are pixelated- as in its normal art that has a pixelization filter over it.

The gameplay involves zooming in and out (its a 4X space game), and the issues are:

  • Planets being un-pixelated look weird. Because its open world, you cant do parallax scrolling, so everything visually appears on the same plane, hence this issue.
  • Planets that ARE pixelated also look weird, as when you zoom in, the pixels are quite large.
  • if you do an in-between where they are at a resolution of ~512x512, its ok, but they look blurry and low quality.

My idea basically means the pixel art ships stay pixel art, if you zoom out the planets/backgrounds get simplified, and when zooming in the details appear, but still pixelated so it doesnt look blurry, or TOO pixelated.

The issue is, ive created a render texture, attached a camera to it, created another overlay camera for the ships and whatnot, but no matter the combination, it always break the camera. Nothing renders, it renders the wrong thing, etc. Ive used overlay cameras before, but only for long distance objects, never for a render texture, so im not sure how to go about this.

For the general camera settings: Both orthographic, one thats 0-10 as a ship overlay, one thats 10-20 that has the pixel-izer on it.

Thank for any help you can give! If it doesnt work, im sure ill find a workaround… the burry ones are ok, but only ok.

2

I’ve toyed with pixelization at differing / mixed levels before, such as simply mixing a low-resolution RenderTexture camera and true “pixel graphics,” as in sprites made large enough to clearly see their pixels.

It never seems to give what I would consider a happy result. Pixel stuff is deceptively hard to make look good, and I think harmony across pixel size may actually be a prerequisite.

One way that sort of helped was to put fine black lines around the foreground pixel sprites, either full-pixel black lines or else finer lines, like one or two actual pixel size.

The only combinations that ever seemed to have any kind of promise were:

  • a normal (or slightly-blurred) high-resolution background render with extremely cartoony stuff over it, sharply outlined and pixelated
  • something that was very low in saturation, such as a Limbo

The former look reminded me of those “photo comics” from the 1970s where they paint or photograph a scene, then composite sharp cartoon characters / props atop the scene. It could even have the RoadRunner / Wile-E-Coyote look: painted low-contrast backgrounds with sharp outlined characters on top.

The latter I think works just because your eyes are so keyed to lightness / darkness that they forgive the edge textures.

I think another problem is that you’re contemplating zooming… zooming smoothly immediately begins to make pixel art dance, either with itself (such as a low-resolution camera pointed at a 3D scene) or “against” the screen pixels itself (such as a low-resolution sprite expanding). And those two things happening at once will probably look really bizarre in a way you cannot control.

As for this actual error:

I have only done this tinkering with old BiRP tools, not any of the HDRP / URP stuff. Your best bet is to make a simple static scene with the technologies you contemplate, layers to split them up to different cameras, and work with it until it works. If you can’t get a simple scene to work, I guess post the test materials here and see if anyone else can spot what is going wrong. Getting URP / HDRP to work should be only about the same level of effort as BiRP was, just… different.