koobas.hobune.stream
Is it practical to use videos as textures for the walls of a room?
I designed an image to be used as the wallpaper for a room in our game, however we recently decided the wallpaper should be animated. The animation part isn't a problem (it's just moving some layers slightly), but I'm wondering what's the best way to get it into Unity. My first thought was to just save them as videos, but I'm worried that playing 4 1080p videos at once might be taxing. My only other thought was importing the layers into Unity separately and animating them there. The problem is it wouldn't give me as much freedom in animating, but I'm wondering what you all think is the best solution.
Thanks!
Running 4 1080p videos is the worst you can do inside a game since playing a single 1080p video is still taxing for some devices. You will surely be restricting your target device configuration if you do so.
Games are all about efficiency and playing videos is certainly gonna give you a major performance hit. It's sometimes better to have a little less quality graphics and a smoother gameplay than otherwise.
So I would suggest to not go with the video method.
Yes you can use video as textures but I would avoid it if possible. I have built video streaming apps in unity and apps that play local videos and I can tell you that integrating video won't save you any work. At best you are trading some problems for others. If you do decide to go forward to try it out. Here are some resources:
You if you have some flexibility as to video file formats I would try the built in video texture functionality first.
If that doesn't work there are a number of solutions on the asset store that might help.
I have used both of these:
They are a little pricy and had their issues (file size vs playback speed, cross platform compatibility, color space bugs etc.) I don't know if they are the best but they did work for our projects needs.
Most of these solutions work by calling out to players on the users system which means that your cross platform compatibility (win vs. mac vs. mobile vs. web) and your machine to machine compatibility (do they have Quicktime installed) will be a factor. Including 4+ 1080p videos in your project will make the build size go way up.
It has been a couple of months since I last did any video in Unity work and there seems to be some new asset store packages available ( https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/video%20 )
I hope this was helpful. If you do find any really good solutions you should post back to let us know.
