Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Using Render Textures to send camera output to places other than the screen

Cameras do not have to output directly to the screen all the time. Different effects can be achieved by having the cameras send their output to a Render Texture asset file. In the scene, 3D objects can be linked to a Render Texture asset file, and so the output of a camera can be directed to 3D objects such as Planes and Cubes.

In this recipe, first, we'll duplicate the over-the-shoulder Main Camera child of the ThirdPersonController, and send the output of this duplicate camera (via a RenderTexture asset file) to a plane on one of the house walls. Then, we'll add a different camera facing out from the wall. This is so that our plane will act just like a mirror, rather than duplicating the over-the-shoulder Main Camera:

Figure 11.12 – A copy of Main Camera rendering to Render Texture, which is being displayed on a Plane in the scene