I just gave my project a go in 5.4b19 from 5.2. In 5.2, I have some computer screen that are built up with world space UIs rendered to a rendertexture. This allows me to use a texture atlas with the rendertexture, do some stuff in a custom shader, and also I like the look of setting the rendertexture as the emission texture.
It doesn’t seem to work in 5.4 though. The UI doesn’t get rendered to the texture. Is this an intentional change, or is it a bug? It seems like a bug, but I guess there may be a valid reason for it.
Is there some benefit to using a render texture besides some visual effects? I just use the standard UI in world space with collision boxes on the controls and a little custom code to fire mouse clicks and so on. I’m quite limited but in my case all I really need are buttons and a couple input fields.
I’m on 5.2.3p3. Too scared to update to anything more recent at the moment.
The main reason to render UI to a render texture that I know of is for doing post effects on the UI (ie Blurs, glows etc)
Which there doesn’t seem to be a way to do blurs nicely anymore, since there’s no options that work that render the UI both to the screen and to a render texture at the same time.
Aside from the visual effects, there is another situation where getting the world space UI onto a rendertexture is important. My game also has a jumbotron that shows what the cameras see. Other games might have a security camera or something similar. If the UI is not properly captured by the rendertexture, then the image on your virtual screen will not match up with what is actually in the scene.
I’m with you on the fear of updating. It’s why I didn’t get 5.3. I tried 5.4 because I wanted to try out the temporal AA, but in addition to the rendertexture problem the light baking was way over exposed compared to 5.2. It sucks that Unity has all these features marketed but there doesn’t seem to be a version of Unity in which all of them work. So you have to choose which features are important and which bugs you can deal with. Meanwhile they keep adding new features that introduce even more bugs. I’m not sure we’ll get a truly stable release until they decide to stop focusing on adding stuff and start focusing more on fixing stuff.