DepthNormals texture into custom global variable

Question

I have a camera...

 _camera = GetComponent<Camera>();
 _camera.depthTextureMode = DepthTextureMode.DepthNormals;

...whose DepthNormals texture I use in a shader

 sampler2D _CameraDepthNormalsTexture;

Works perfectly!

But when I try to put the DepthNormalsTexture into my own global variable...

 _camera.targetTexture = new RenderTexture(_camera.pixelWidth, _camera.pixelHeight, 16, RenderTextureFormat.ARGB32);
 _camera.targetTexture.filterMode = FilterMode.Bilinear;
 Shader.SetGlobalTexture(_globalTextureName, _camera.targetTexture);

... it doesn't work. It's not the same. And I am unable to make it work in t$$anonymous$$s RenderTexture + SetGlobalTexture way.

What I've tried so far:

Various sorts of RenderTexture formats
Assign the camera's RenderTexture directly to the shaders using them. T$$anonymous$$s also behaved weirdly, that's why my guess is that my RenderTexture has different contents from _CameraDepthNormalsTexture.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Answer by StarkeyBoy · Apr 12, 2018 at 08:05 AM

@Doidel

When the camera renders to a texture, it renders what it can see (based on the applied culling mask filters) NOT the depth normals. You access the depth and normal data from wit$$anonymous$$n the shader using the inbuilt _CameraDepthNormalsTexture variable (w$$anonymous$$ch gives access to the GBuffer from the GPU side).

The only time that I've seen the shader variable being accessed outside the GPU is to pass them into a compute shader. If you are using compute shaders you have to pass t$$anonymous$$s into the shader ComputeShader.SetTextureFromGlobal(CSMainkernalID, "_DepthNormalsTexture", "_CameraDepthNormalsTexture");

Hope t$$anonymous$$s helps.

Add comment · Share

Answer 2

Thanks for your explanation @StarkeyBoy!
I am not using a compute shader. Instead, in my forward rendering setup, I have a surface shader w$$anonymous$$ch accesses the _CameraDepthNormalsTexture of a camera A with depth -1. There is also a camera B with depth 0 around, but like t$$anonymous$$s, the surface shader uses camera A's _CameraDepthNormalsTexture.

Now if I switch the forward rendering setup to a deferred one, the surface shader doesn't work out of the box anymore. T$$anonymous$$s didn't come as a surprise to me, and I thought the easiest way to circumvent t$$anonymous$$s is to simply draw the camera's rendered depth and normal data (GBuffer) to a texture and then just reference that texture in my surface shader. After all, since I can do that with an albedo texture, why not with the depthNormals texture.

Should I also use somet$$anonymous$$ng like MySurfaceShader.SetTextureFromGlobal(SSMainkernalID, "_DepthNormalsTexture", "_CameraDepthNormalsTexture"); or do you have a suggestion how I can make sure that my surface shader has access to camera A's GBuffer (w$$anonymous$$ch btw indeed has a specific culling mask)?

Thanks again for your effort, much appreciated!

DepthNormals texture into custom global variable

2 Replies

Your answer

Welcome to Unity Answers

Follow this Question

Related Questions