UI Model Viewer?

Unity Engine
1

Many games include this, games like Oblivion showed a preview of the character in the Inventory as well as Skyrim which shows previews of items.

An example of this in a Unity game is one of my favourite puzzle games, “The Room”, where the items in the left-hand bar have 3D previews when clicked on.

1433×1003 93.1 KB

How is this done, and can it be done with the new UI system or does it require something else?

2

My first thought is a layer camera masked to view just a UI layer, targeted to a render texture which you display as an image in the UI.

3

So for this method I need to have a camera somewhere in the scene looking at this object then?

4

You could use Graphics.DrawMesh() to draw a mesh that doesn’t exist in the scene as an object.

I think the camera itself needs to exist in the scene, but you use the layermask to ensure it doesn’t display anything you don’t want it to.