Fade Between Two Cameras Rendering the Same Scene

Questions
1

So I am working on an auto director camera thingy, and one of the requested features is to be able to fade and do transitions between cameras.

There will always be one main camera, and then one secondary camera always doing its own thing for a teleprompt that will be always displaying that secondary cameras output which will also be running its own director system.

Long story short I’m trying to figure out the best way to work this up which in my mind I have two options.

One, have the primary and secondary camera both be rendering at the same resolution (ick) and combine them on a post pass or have them going to separate canvases that I fade in and out blah blah (that way they can keep the default rendering pipeline). The problems with this is I will have to come up with some conversion process to ensure that the in game display is getting rtt data in the correct dimensions, not to bad.

Two, have the primary camera doing its own thing. Have the secondary camera doing its own thing and rendering at a way way lower resolution because its game-ception and does not need much. Then when the need arises for a transition other then a fade to black (wipes, fadeOutTo, etc), I dynamically create a new camera or possibly clone the primary camera, add it to the renderstack, fire the transition, once the transition is done have the main camera match the new camera, swap them out and destroy the new one then proceed to cleanup. This one seems to be technically harder, and then Ill be having 3 cameras so that will triple the draw calls on an already extensive scene.

While typing this up I came up with a third idea. Kind of a hybrid of the two. I just ignore the secondary camera, and always on the heads up display show what the main camera shows but a downgraded pass of it clipped to the correct size. Then do the dynamic creation of the camera idea.

So now the question is first if anyone has any better ideas I have not thought about. Then also what would be the best option for mixing the two cameras output while keeping the default rendering pipeline intact?

2

I would usually go with “one” during the transition and then the normal rendering code path once everything has been set.