How to play a movie texture in a lightprojector cookie.

I'm trying to play a movie file using a spotlight with a projector/light shader attached.
I'm also playing a video on some mesh which works great. I modified that script a bit to make the light play the movie but I can't seem to find a way to make the "cookie" play it. The scripts is trying to play the mainTexture which is in this case just a plain color. I'm a total noob in Unity so forgive my ignorance

This is the script

void Start () {

MovieTexture mt = (MovieTexture)GetComponent<Projector>().material.mainTexture;

mt.loop = true;
mt.Play();
}

}

 

I found the solution myself. Starting a movie is seems a global thing so I made and dummy object with everything disabled except the script that makes the movie play.

 

Just a note for you moving forward: movie textures are expensive, so if you get a big FPS hit, you might want to consider blending between multiple textures instead of using a movie texture.

Every time you go to sample from a movie texture (which is likely every frame), Unity has to make a texture out of a frame of the video based on how much time has passed, then sample from that texture.

 

Hi, i see it was years ago- I just started unity some weeks ago. I want to achive the same thing, using videos or image sequences as light cookies. I want to use 60-120 frame long animations. I tried to do this with emissioning videos from an object to another, it looks cool, but thats not i searching for. Blending between 5-8 cookies will do the trick, but I just can't do it right now, even don't know where to start. Do you ever created a working script, or tutorial for this?

 

Now there is a Unity Video API that allows you to create a "Video Player" component. There are different Render Modes you can use, one of them allows you to output the video to a texture, which you can then use as a cookie.

 

Not the first time that I read this solution, but I can't seem to make it work.
The light just projects a white square cookie with the same ratio of the video.
Tried both RenderTexture and CustomRenderTexture without success.
Is it working for you?

 

I haven't tried it until just now. I've got it working, but there are some extra steps.

Cookies use the alpha channel of the texture to determine how much light to block. The VideoPlayer component draws fully opaque textures, which means the entire part of the texture covered in video will allow light to pass through. There may be other solutions, but this is what I did to fix this.

I have 2 RenderTextures. I render the video to the first texture as described previously. From there, I have a simple script on my camera that uses

Graphics.Blit()

to copy the first texture to the second texture using a custom material any time that camera is about to render. (I think) it is important that this script is attached to the camera.

Code (CSharp):

1. public class Vid2Cookie : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.  
4.     [SerializeField] RenderTexture videoTexture = null;
5.     [SerializeField] RenderTexture cookieTexture = null;
6.     [SerializeField] Material cookieMaterial = null;
7.  
8.     void OnPreRender()
9.     {
10.         Graphics.Blit(videoTexture, cookieTexture, cookieMaterial);
11.     }
12.  
13. }

My custom material uses a custom shader that converts RGB color values to an alpha value. This is a basic unlit shader with an added line in the fragment shader portion.

Code (CSharp):

1. fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
2. {
3.     fixed4 col = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
4.     col.a = (col.r + col.g + col.b) / 3;
5.     return col;
6. }

After that, my Cookie Texture is ready to use.