Rendering UnityGUI stuff in render texture

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

Is there a way to render the GUI layer to a render texture?
I find UnityGUI useful when it comes to text rendering, and basically I would like to “bake” some rendered texts into a render texture, so that I can use them in a 3D world. I don’t want to use TextMesh for this as I would like my text to be wrapped on 3D geometry.

I have been trying to render OnGUI code onto a render texture, but it doesn’t seem to be possible. I tried to create a separate camera, set a render texture as its target, set up the culling masks and add a GUI layer component to it, but I couldn’t successfully have the OnGUI code render to texture instead of screen.

Has anyone tried that before? Any hints appreciated…

2

Unfortunately you cannot do that. Also, you cannot capture UnityGUI stuff with a camera.

What you could do is: using Texture2D manipulation methods, you could modify your texture content (pixel-by-pixel).

Use Texture.GetPixels and Texture.SetPixels. Keep in mind this method is pretty slow for huge textures.

3

The GUILayer hasn’t anything to do with OnGUI code. It’s for GUIText and GUITexture objects, so use those instead.

–Eric

4

He wants to put texture into the 3D world…