camera output as a texture?

sir-knight

In max8 can I output the what the camera sees directly to a texture? I want to simulate filming a tv screen that's showing the camera feed.

Is this something that has to happen in post, or can I do it with the material editor?

The Mad Artist

As far as I know the best way would be to just render the camera's view and then use that avi as the diffuse and self illumination textures on your tv screen.

Edit: yeah, I didn't know you were going for the hall of mirrors thing either.

sir-knight

but that won't give me the realtime camera/screen view into infinity unless I do it a few times.

nezach

Yeah, it's been a while, but I think you can still render out the camera sequence and use the Image File List utility to create an .ifl file. Add a material to your screen and use a bitmap texture then select the ifl file as the file.

Or just encode the camera POV sequence as a .avi or .mov and use that.

Edit: ahh you want the hall of mirrors effect. Don't know of a direct set up off the top of my head for that.

Eric Chadwick

You can do this, just not in real-time (won't show up in the viewport). Quick way... put two planes facing each other, with an object ion between them, and put a Raytrace map in the Reflection slot of the material.

nezach

Now that I think about it "Hall of mirrors" isn't strictly the correct terminology of what he's going for I think. More like video feedback. Like when the camera views the playback monitor and you get that recursive delayed image repeated.

Eric Chadwick

You might be able set up something like this with manually-created IFLs, kind of where you suggested going with it.

Setup a queue in Video Post so that one camera spits out a sequence of images, then later in the queue another camera points at the surface that's mapped with that sequence. Kind of a mess though, and not really recursive unless you add umpteen cameras to the queue, each referencing the previous camera and spitting out its own sequence for the next.