How fast can I realistically update the environment texture?

[angus]

We're toying with the idea of using a filmed background for some digital actors to play upon, but wish to have camera freedom. If we had a set of 3D coordinates of the camera and a cubemap from it's perspective at those coordinates, could we fake the view by updating the environment map cube at 30 FPS?

 

Also, having looked at the Render-related documentation, I don't see how to do it other than jockeying EnvironmentPreset's 3 slot system.

Edited July 5, 2019 by angus

[morbid]

Hi,

That can work in theory but it's hard to predict how fast will the texture be updated in your app. It depends on the overall system load.

I can suggest you to experiment with this. If you'll run into some coding issues, we'd be glad to help. Just send us a sample.

By the way, have you considered CUDA? We have a sample: Samples -> 3rd party -> NVIDIA.

Thanks!

[angus]

Thanks, Morbid.

 

Can you give me a steer as to how to get a pointer to the environment cubemap texture itself? I can see how to set the name of the texture but not how to get the texture itself.

[morbid]

36 minutes ago, angus said:

Can you give me a steer as to how to get a pointer to the environment cubemap texture itself?

I'm afraid you can't use Pointers in this case.

I also would like to clarify if you want to use full functionality of environment cubemap. Do you want these streamed images affect lighting and reflections?

If not, it can be done with custom shader, if yes - it could be more challenging than I thought in the first place.

[angus]

9 minutes ago, morbid said:

I also would like to clarify if you want to use full functionality of environment cubemap.

No - it would be a quite limited and not be expected to be reflected. For anything that needs a reflection we'll deal with it separately.

 

 

 

[morbid]

Possible approach is to render your custom cubemap into the final image with a custom shader.

The idea is the following:

• The sky part of the final image has zero alpha channel value
• You can render your cubemap into the image
• Then blend final image with your image

[angus]

Thank you, that is very helpful.