Skyrim Books. How did they made the text on the pages?

Questions & Answers
1

I cannot find anything useful on the internet that would give me an idea how the text of the Books in Skyrim are made…

by observing how the animation of the pages of the books works. I think I can recreate them.
But for the text in the books I have no idea how they made this.

If I set in Skyrim the quality of anything to the lowest, the text in the books is still clearly readable but the papertexture is really bad… so it seems that the text is not a texture, only the paper is a texture.

18810-skyrim_books.gif

my thoughts:

I had the idea to create a camera that renders its hudtext to a texture and map that to the books pages but I think when a player plays my game at low resolution that then he would also not be able to read the text. and its performance is not good.
but I would be able to change the text in the hud via script.

another idea would be to create a texture like a spritesheet with the text and let it control in the shader via script.
I think in a 2048x2048 texture I could fit 20 pages of 512x512px. that would be enough pixel to display enough text. but still the problem when the player sets the resolution down he will not be able to read the text.

sooo is there a way of preventing texture scaling at lower game settings?
or does a way exist to render text to texture directly via script?

2

Here, I made a quick example of how this could work.
Pages would need to be flat when turning as text wont deform along with it (no idea how that would be achieved, but it sounds like it would be very complicated with very little payback).

This is the easiest, most straightforward way to get it done.
As you can see since the Text Mesh is attached to each page you can turn them around and it’ll come along, and of course since it’s a Text Mesh component you can easily attach a script to change the text itself.

18813-example.jpg
18813-example.jpg879×1299 147 KB

3

You’d need Unity Pro. You can then render to a texture. Have the texture of the page set to your newly rendered texture, then flip with ease.

4

Use TextMesh as Alejandro suggests, if flat pages are acceptable. Otherwise, you will need a text-to-texture solution. Then, you can just texture your 3d page model. Here are some options for that, the first one is designed for runtime use:

http://blog.almostlogical.com/2010/08/20/adding-text-to-texture-at-runtime-in-unity3d-without-using-render-texture/

http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/

http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/Hiero

5

ok now I found a solution by myselfe how to prevent the text if it is a texture to be downscaled and blurry on low end PCs.
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/589881/prevent-1-texture-from-being-scaled-down-if-i-play.html

I think I am not able to create something that renders me text to a texture on the fly except I use a second camera that renders its hud text to a texture.

So I will go with the decal texture solution and then it should work like I want it. ^^

here is my test of the pages with shapekeys.
18908-skyrim_books_harry64_test.gif