Hi,

I am new to 3D rendering. Currently I have an idea about minimap. As far as I know, minimap generally rendered by a camera facing the terrain. In this way, minimap shows the upper faces of all the mesh to render.

I am wondering whether it is possible to render the minimap like the meshes have a different material, or merge with a normal map and height map of the meshes. What I means is that to add more mesh information(e.g. normal, height) into the 2D minimap, not just a simple rendering form a sky camera. Is it possible or valuable to do so?

Thanks.

Are you meaning create another scene for rendering minimap? Would that be too complicated? I don't want to create a copy of my game scene so that I can use different materials or geometry. I just want to create one scene, and render the minimap based on it.

Are you meaning create another scene for rendering minimap? Would that be too complicated? I don't want to create a copy of my game scene so that I can use different materials or geometry. I just want to create one scene, and render the minimap based on it.

Minimap is just different presentation of that scene not different scene itself. For gameplay and UI design reason it has to be clearly readable. Totally different needs than main scene rendering.

And you don't create a direct copy of your main scene. You add different geometry to the minimap scene, to account for the fact that the view is smaller. Sure, you need some means of tying the minimap geometry and the main view geometry together, but that should be trivial if designed right.

Thanks. I want to solve this problem by automatically create a readable by some calculation or specific shader. Is this valuable? I mean is it valuable or worth to find a solution to automatically create a minimap that meets our needs and reduce the work to create a second scene?

And you don't create a direct copy of your main scene. You add different geometry to the minimap scene, to account for the fact that the view is smaller. Sure, you need some means of tying the minimap geometry and the main view geometry together, but that should be trivial if designed right.

Thanks. I want to solve this problem by automatically create a readable by some calculation or specific shader. Is this valuable? I mean is it valuable or worth to find a solution to automatically create a minimap that meets our needs and reduce the work to create a second scene?

in case the large scale view of your scene does not expand the already loaded scene you do not have to recreate anything, just draw the scene again from top down drawing every node of scene in a diffrent way than normaly, like a dot, brown square or so. you can also simplify it by a static map texture, drawing only relevant volatile objects, player, and other. Remember also you can draw tha large scale scene with the same shaders as in detail view offline, to a texture map, resulting in a static asset that will very accurately represent top down of the very scene, and than use this static map to display few volatile objects of player interest. You will be able to recreate this static map in seconds, to ease your production process and have very accurate top view. But many times it will demand a little post processing to hide extreme tilling visible and so on.