Taking a Full-Scale Screenshot of an Isometric Whitebox Level?

Unity Engine
1

I am currently looking into ways to create a “pre-rendered’ or hand-drawn background environment for my isometric perspective game and got the idea to take a full-size, to-scale screenshot (relative to the player character) of the entire game level beyond what can normally be seen by the camera at any given time. I have read about potentially just zooming a second camera out and taking a screenshot that way, but the goal was to have a screenshot that an artist could draw over and import into Unity so that the player character and in-game camera perspective perfectly scales with the imported background and I’m not sure a zoomed out screenshot would do this well.

Is there an existing asset/tool or example of how to do this? I’m basically trying to do a large, isometric, scrollable version of the pre-rendered backgrounds from the old resident-evil or final fantasy games by drawing over a screenshot of a white boxed level from a Unity project.

2

This is an interesting problem. I’ve had doing this exactly on my backlog.

Here was my plan:

  1. Have Snapshot camera.
  2. Render specific layers (background layers) on this camera.
  3. Output Snapshot camera to Render Texture. It will probably help later if it’s 1:1 aspect and the RT is 1:1 dimensions.
  4. Manually .Render() the camera.
  5. Save Render Texture to PNG: you can use rt.ReadPixels to read the RenderTexture into a normal Texture2D, then you can save that using tex.EncodeToPNG.
  6. Reposition the camera so that it slightly overlaps its last snapshot. This is to prevent seams. But maybe it is possible for your case to do this pixel-perfectly so you don’t need any overlap.
  7. Repeat until you have a full snapshot of the scene, or a big chunk of it.
  8. Combine the pngs together. I suppose you could save the Texture2Ds until this step, then read make a huge one and dump their data into this big texture then finally output as PNG.

Patching together the PNGs might be more trouble than it’s worth so once you have a PNG it could be worth using that directly in your scene. For you I think the workflow of the artist matters too.

Ok you have my plan. If it works out please let me know!

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3

Will do! I’ll let you know what I figure out. Thanks

4

@bbaugh007 Did you get it to work?

5

I ended up doing something similar, but it just takes a extremely huge screenshot of everything at once at a certain angle. Hopefully, once I start working with artists, it will be enough for them to work with. Thanks for your help.

I also have an idea for grid-based collision object placement to match up with what the artist draws.

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