How can I make a 2D/"3D" object that'll point in a direction on the widget interface, without having that object on the scene

Development Programming & Scripting
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1

One thing, you need to know before answering my post:

  • I didn’t fully do my research about my issue so I’m still searching about it.

  • On the information I succeed to gather for now, if I’m wrong about it or it oppose with what I already said or will say, you can overrule this:

    • I don’t want to use the Scenecapture2D because the mesh is on the scene.
    • I don’t want a real object sticking at my camera, because it would seems not in the interface

  • On the video game reference, I have the Outer Wilds Compass that is exactly the same thing that I want to make right now :

    outer-wilds-18
    outer-wilds-18212×191 7.13 KB

    Rip-storsion
    Rip-storsion222×222 44.8 KB

So, the context is that I did a gravity change for the player, we received some feedback about it and generaly some people found that give them nausea due to the camera angle that change depending of the gavity angle changement.

The problem is that I want to keep the same effect like Outer Wild, when we go on gravity ground or when we in space.

So one of the things that stands out the most was to set a visual feedback on the interface that give direction of where the ground is.

So finally I’ll say exactly want I want to make :

I want to make an object that point to ground, that look like 3D but in a Widget, ideally that can be transparent.

Thus, do someone know how to do such a thing or happen to know a link (any type ) that talk about such a thing ?

2

I would do the SceneCapture method. Yes the object will “exist” but it never has to be visible to anybody in the world. You are rendering it with a completely different camera with different FOV and piping it through a material to make it look like an interesting part of the UI.

If you really really want, you can try the old school method of having a pre-rendered sprite for every possible angle of the compass and treating it as a Flipbook. Your player’s point of view every frame chooses a different part of the texture atlas that corresponds. This is how most pseudo-3D retro games were made.

The third option is to be a shader wizard and literally code it all into a material since it looks like basic lines and angles, but that’s way too complex for me.

3

The fact that you don’t want to use the features provided leaves you with no good options. You can try to draw some textures and modify them with some isometric projection so they look kinda 3D. This, in essence, will be trying to rewrite the 3D engine but in the widget.

So in short - use what you have and try both methods above.

  • There is no problem for the mesh to be in the scene. This is the place for meshes - embrace it.
  • There is no problem for an object to be stuck to the camera - it can look like whatever you like.