Animation Question- Material from Camera

[Alexander McGee]

I was wondering if it is possible to add what a camera sees in a scene onto a material.

A general purpose of this would be like during a real life FIRST speech by dean kamen or something, when you have th big screen showing them from a camera, and you can see they in real life too.

I know the possibility of exporting as a movie, and importing again, but I don't want to do it that way. I want a real-time way. Perhaps there is a plug-in or something?

Thanks CD

[Alexander McGee]

Ok, i figured that ur supposed to use camera map, but i dunno how it works. Im extremelly confused!! It's a modifyer, and it dosnt make sence to me.

thanks

[ErichKeane]

If it is an analog(most reg footprint digitals too) video camera, most of the time they will have either an SVIDEO out connector, which should display what is onscreen, or an RCA out (its the 3 colored wires, yellow is video), or some kind of proprietary connector.

Write down the specific model of camera that you plan to use, and i will check it out for you if you would like. 99% of cameras do have a video passthrough on them though, so just try!

[Alexander McGee]

I can't believe i forgot...

This is for 3ds max!


LOL

sorry for any confusion

[Matt Hallock]

This is somewhat of a wild stab...

You know how you can get streaming video? Of things that are actually happening? Well, if somehow you could use the material to use the hyperlink to a streaming link you set up, it should work.

[Soukup]

these ideas dont seem to be helping you, so here's what u can do if I have the right idea of what you're trying to do.

I think that you are trying to take an viedo, and then put the video into the background. So you could see the image in the background on the big screen, and see the exact thing in the main frame.

If thats not your idea, then stop reading, cause this wont help u.

Basically, you're gonna have to render twice. First you'd take the original sequence and render that. This could also be live-video.
And then you would apply the material onto the the screen and re-render it. there is no other way to it, because if you think about it, the camera would be rendering a big screen tv, based solely on information that it had not rendered yet, because there would be stuff below the screen.

I would think that it is near impossible...... unless you wanna get real freaky and try to do some compositing in video post. By using the outputed image and then throwing it onto the same scene over the screen. This will be really tricky and I have no idea if it works, probably not. It looks like you'll have to rely on render/ re-render to finish this sequence.

hope that helped

[rrockafellow]

There isn't a realtime way within 3ds max to project a Live video texture onto a texture in a 3ds max scene.

I suppose my question would be what is your final output going to be? How do you want to deliver the final rendered product?

The only reason you could want a live realtime texture is if your going to generate a realtime composited video stream.

If your going to output it to tape or to a movie file then I'll second the prior opinion that you have to already have a movie file, or sequntial images of what you want projected.

As far as how do you use the camera map modifier.
Use the World space Camera map modifier.

I'll attach an example using the cam map modifier

[Alexander McGee]

Yes, there is a way to do the real time in 3dsmax 6. Ill adopt it to the file you sent. Thanks

[rrockafellow]

Your right 3ds max can do real-time, I didn't say that it couldn't.

What I said was that it can't do realtime with a live real-time video feed. Or at least not without one hell of a computer to do it like a Large SGI reality machine.

If you find a way to do it. Your the man.

[Alexander McGee]

Yep. thanks a lot!

But, we have 3 sgi's runnin unix and windows server 2003. that's plenty of processing power. lol

thanks again.

[djcapelis]

It's likely cinelerra could also server a similar process perhaps harnessing network rendering better than 3ds...

As for your win2k3... that doesn't neccesarily say anything concerning available processor resources.

[rrockafellow]

Just so you know, I don't know that for your intended purpose that you wouldn't specifically need to use a camera map modifier. All the camera map modifier does is assign UV coordinates.

If your were going to use video as your source. And all you wanted was the video texture play on the monitor of a 3D object. You could assign the texture coordinates with uvw map modifier or uvw unwrap that specifies where the video image will be applied.