Photorealism. Render elements projection.

Questions & Answers
1

I want to make a photorealistic technical simulator. Actually, it's just a control panel with lots of buttons, switches, indicator lights, etc. I need it to be as photorealistic as possible and want to do the following: 1) to make a model with base texture and bump in Unity. 2) to render different render elements in my 3d app(specular, shadows, reflection, etc). 3) to compose render elements in photoshop. 4) to project them onto the model.

And this is the question: can I project them with alpha channel onto the model? And if I can then how?

Want to do something like this:

There is another option: to bake render elements to texture, but the first variant is more user friendly.-)

So any suggestions? Has anyone tried to make a photorealistic model with Unity?

p.s. The camera doest't rotate and moves only back and forward along its local axis.

2

You can project images onto a scene using a projector. You just have to have the image repeat settings set to clamp and choose a projector material. Unity will automatically read the alpha channel for transparency.

Honestly though, I don't think your method is more user friendly by any means over baking textures, and I don't think your performance will be as good. As far as baking goes, you can bake reflection and specular into your main texture, that's not hard at least in Blender, I'm not sure what your using. The AO and shadows can be baked into a lightmap, either in your modeler or using Unity's built-in light mapper when 3.0 comes out.