Camera view as texture

[jason-ray]

Hello everyone. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how I could use a camera view in scene as the color of a texture in the same scene.  In other words create a texture that uses a camera view as the color. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[joojaa]

2 ways. render 2 times*, its far easier than one would think, and filters really well. Or raytrace, unfortunately theres no such node ready made, making oen is easy enough tough.

Incidenttally if you want really blurred reflections on flat surfaces you can use the render 2 times trick, it really pans out sometimes.

*to render 2 times call the other render from pre render Frame MEL box in the render options. Then use that file as texture.

[jason-ray]

Thank you for your reply. But I'm afraid I'm still lost. I am a bit of a novice. I have very little experience Mel scripting. Could you explain how to render 2 times in a bit more detail? I'll be doing simplified facial animation in the camera view, if it makes my goal clearer. I got the Idea from watching the childrens program Pocoyo and thought it would be better to do all the animation in the scene rather than render out images then import them back into the scene as a layer in a texture. Thank you for your help anyway.

[jason-ray]

I thought of a simple way to do it. I'll simply parent my face rig along with its own camera to the head of my character. then when I am done animating I can simply export the entire face rig along with all of its key frames to another file and render the perfectly timed images of the 2D face out from there. That way I can have a bit more flexibilty with the face while animating and take advante of the tools in Maya. I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. I'll post more info on this when I'm done incase anyone is interested in the future