Curved Canvas?

I'm trying to give the effect of a fighter pilot HUD, which is projected on the curved surface of his helmet.

However, I can't find out how to do this kind of effect. The canvas doesn't appear to be able to deform its render view.

The best I can come up with is this;



Which is rather too linear for my taste.

Does anyone know how to do it, or if it's even possible?

 

Just an idea, make a camera render a canvas. Then make the camera render to a texture. Then map this render texture onto a curved shape.

 

Interesting, but I have the feeling that it would be terrible for performance.

 

Eh, it's a stable overhead. You'll probably be fine unless you're targeting mobile or low end machines.

 

Well... I am targeting mobile.

 

Have you considered programmatically setting the positions as a function of their X component at runtime? I.e. as the component gets closer to the middle, increase their Z and set their Y rotation to some sine function. Would look fine as long as you don't have large, solid and horizontal bits of GUI.

 

I did... but as you can see from my screenshot, I do have long horizontal bits of GUI.

 

The best way to do this would probably be with the fisheye image effect and a dedicated camera, but it's expensive. So what you're doing now is probably the only/best option for mobile, but you might be able to add prerendered images as well to help fake the distortion?

 

Would fisheye really be less expensive than render-to-texture (since both would require Pro anyway)? I would've expected render-to-texture to be the cheaper of the two, since so little geometry is actually being rendered.

 

By "best" I mean "best looking", but it is probably a lot more expensive than render-to-texture.

 

file:///Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Documentation/html/en/ScriptReference/UIVertex.html
I suggest playing with this one.

 

Interesting, but I can't find where it's used in Canvas...

 

file:///Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/Documentation/html/en/ScriptReference/UI.BaseVertexEffect.html

It is the base for effects like shadows, outlines.

 

Quite interesting. However, it's only a vertex stream, there is no tris soup - index list, so I have no idea how to insert triangle into the existing structure.

 

Ok... Do I understand two quad cannot share the same vertex, or that the same vertex have to be added multiple time in the list?

 

how about pre-warping the UI elements in PS or AE? You would only need to do digits 0 - 9 and duplicate. It is pretty trivial to wire up some code to swap sprites to do you numbers instead of relying on fonts and setting text.

Obviously it gets complex if you want onscreen alphabet text then I would go with RT.