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Backdrop camera

Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 8:32 am
by Kaki
Hello

In y new game, I must use a backdrop camera. My new game is a point & click whit a static background. The backdrop camerea means a 2D picture which is drawn in the back of 3D world. After I do that, I will put a plane mesh for collision. It will be invisible. The camera don't have to move.

What are the solutions with Irrlicht to have this static view?

Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:53 pm
by Frodenius
create the static camera then render its view once to a texture and use it for the mesh. after that you can drop the camera and start the main game loop.

Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:54 pm
by kburkhart84
If you can't rotate the camera at all like I think you mean to say as well, then you could just use a billboard scene node. It will face the camera and you can texture it with whatever you want. Since you aren't moving the camera, you don't need a Skybox.

Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 6:54 pm
by dwmitch
When I toyed around with this the method I used was to put the pre-rendered image on a 640 x 480 billboard (the image itself was 1024 x 1024 rendered in a 1:1 aspect ratio in Blender). Then I set up an ortho camera in addition to the main camera, set everything but the background invisible, rendered with the ortho, set everything else to visible and the background invisible, then rendered with the perspective camera.

You'll have to play around with the camera settings to get the billboard to fill the view without gaps. It's been a few months since I've tried this and I can't remember the settings.

Also, I didn't have luck with invisible collision meshes, as it seemed that when you set the mesh to invisible it quit registering collisions and I thought it would be enough of a triviality not to get Newton involved, but if you use a physics library you should be able to load a mesh to use for the collision geometry without having to draw it.

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 2:54 pm
by Kaki
Thanks for your replies.

I didn't think to use a billboard. I must use this rather than a mesh for performance, isn't it?

@dwmitch : thanks for the invisible collision. I used Newton in a last project and no problem to continue.