I am a film guy and I dabble in Unity. I was wondering if Unity3d could be used as a previz system for film and video.
I would be curious to talk to others about how they see the pipeline working…
Yeah its definately doable. You’d probably need a shader to sub in footage. For example I worked a bit with guys doing those tv casino / virtual set things. They use propriety software though. Unity in the right hands can and will look a lot better.
Lets see about the feeds - you’d need input for camera transforms to move around virtual sets - this is done using networking. If you’re interested in it just being a rendering path then it gets quite a bit easier - you can just import the 3D package data.
This stuff generally doesn’t need a plugin, unless the source data can’t change and it needs to be compatible with a current setup.
Can you be more specific about your requirements?
As much as I love Unity, I gotta be honest here. I think Cryengine 3 SDK would be far superior for any sort of rendering pre-viz stuff using real time hardware.
Crytek just released a free publicly usable SDK of Cryengine 3 and it has alot of awesome features for machinima. Like it can sync directly to Maya so you can see changes in Maya update inside of the engine instantly, while your making them. Then it has the stuff in it to nicely export a video.
However if your looking to do something other than just get a nicely hardware rendered video, like actually make a scene you could walk around in and make some objects interactive for presentation purposes. Unity would probably be best.
Hm I can’t help but think that cry engine will need a lot more code. Guys were synching this stuff back in the darkbasic era. It’s not rocket science…
Thanks lot guys, much appreciated. My feeling is is most things in this capacity usage could be solved with simple character animations, itween and camera switching.