I had a look at other forums on the site but think this belongs here.
I’ve spent a few hours looking whether anyone else has worked through a similar scenario with good or bad results. I can’t find anything…
Let’s say I have a validated Unity virtual environment that will be built towards WebGL, iOS etc. All good. Now, let’s say I have a website which needs 2D images of said virtual environment. Forget about challenges regarding the service that’ll know what exact images are required for the website (that’s something else)
I assume I’d need an app running on a webserver to somehow retrieve this data from the VE (which would also need to be hosted).
Has anyone heard of this being done before in a performant way? Is there anything off the shelf? (I’ve looked!)
I’ve also looked at screenshot/grab tools which I’d consider for other use cases but not sure if this is the best use case for such a tool.
Any help much appreciated. Or if you think I’m off my rocker, let me know too
By “2D image” do you mean a live stream of whatever is displayed in this “virtual environment”? Or do you mean an occasional screenshot of said environment? And what is a “validated Unity virtual environment” to begin with? Do you mean just an application built with Unity that has VR capabilities? Or do you mean something else?
2D; I actually just mean a static image of the scene. The website would know which model it wants to retrieve the image of and at what angle, height, background etc. I don’t mean occasional requests either. The request would be often (depending on whether or not it’s a new request because some data has been updated which changes the look of the image). Previously requested images would be handled via CloudFront.
By validated, I just mean all of the scenes have been approved by different stakeholders. i.e. it’s good to be built towards specific platforms but the content can also be used by websites (in this case, static images…no game per se)
So, to boil it down even further: You want to have a Unity game running somewhere in a dark, damp place with no direct player interaction through mouse or keyboard. And you want to control that game from a web server somewhere, where that web server tells the game to load a model, look at it from a certain angle, and send the server an image of what it sees.
Does that sound about right?
If that’s what you want to do, then good news and bad news time: Good news is that it’s definitely doable. Bad news is that it’s not an easy undertaking and I’m not aware of any pre-built piece of whatchmajiggarry that can do it for you.
Sounds about right. It would (I assume) be running (like “normal” or perhaps some special way) on a server in the cloud. The service to link the game and website would also be running on a server (and perhaps the service even do some manipulation on the returned image).
Have you seen this being used elsewhere or is this really a niche request? (I’m assuming the latter as can’t find anything on it…no specific project or witchcraft)
