The VideoTexture Module: bge.texture

    • AVI
    • Ogg
    • Xvid
    • Theora
    • dv1394 camera
    • video4linux capture card (this includes many webcams)
    • videoForWindows capture card (this includes many webcams)
    • JPG

    The principle is simple: first you identify an existing texture by object and name,then you create a new texture with dynamic content and swap the two textures in the GPU.The GE is not aware of the substitution and continues to display the object as always,except that you are now in control of the texture. At the end,the new texture is deleted and the old texture restored.

    The present page is a guide to the bge.texture module with simple examples.

    Before you can use the thing bge.texture module,you must have objects with textures applied appropriately.

    Imagine you want to have a television showing live broadcast programs in the game. You willcreate a television object and UV-apply a different texture at the place of the screen, for example tv.png.What this texture looks like is not important;probably you want to make it dark gray to simulate power-off state.When the television must be turned on, you create a dynamic texture from a video capture cardand use it instead of tv.png: the TV screen will come to life.

    You have two ways to define textures that bge.texture can grab:

    • Simple UV texture.
    • Blender material with image texture channel.Because bge.texture works at texture level,it is compatible with all GE fancy texturing features: GLSL, multi-texture, custom shaders,etc.

    Let us assume that we have a game object with one or more faces assigned to a material/image onwhich we want to display a video.

    The first step is to create a Texture object.We will do it in a script that runs once. It can be at the start of the game,the video is only played when you refresh the texture; we will come to that later. The script isnormally attached to the object on which we want to display the video so that we can easilyretrieve the object reference:

    The check on video attribute is just a trick to make sure we create the texture only once.

    1. matID = bge.texture.materialID(obj, 'IMvideo.png')

    bge.texture.materialID()is a handy function to retrieve the object material that is using video.png as texture.This method will work with Blender material and UV texture.In case of UV texture, it grabs the internal material corresponding to the faces that are assigned to this texture.In case of Blender material,it grabs the material that has an image texture channel matching the name as first channel.

    1. matID = bge.texture.materialID(obj, 'MAVideoMat')

    Create Texture

    bge.texture.Texture is the class that creates the Texture object that loads the dynamic texture on the GPU.The constructor takes one mandatory and three optional arguments:

    • gameObj
    • The game object.
    • Material index as returned by bge.texture.materialID(), 0 = first material by default.
    • textureID
    • Texture index in case of multi-texture channel, 0 = first channel by default.In case of UV texture, this parameter should always be 0.
    • textureObj
    • Reference to another object of which we want to reuse the texture.If we use this argument,we should not create any source on this texture and there is no need to refresh it either;the other Texture object will provide the texture for both materials/textures.
    1. GameLogic.video = bge.texture.Texture(obj, matID)

    Note that we have assigned the object to a GameLogic, videoattribute that we have created for the occasion.The reason is that the Texture object must be persistent across the game scripts.A local variable would be deleted at the end of the script and the GPU texture deleted atthe same time. GameLogic module object is a handy place to store persistent objects.

    Create a Source

    Now we have a Texture object but it cannot do anything because it does not haveany source. We must create a source object from one of the possible sources available inbge.texture:

    • VideoFFmpeg
    • Moving pictures.Video file, video capture, video streaming.
    • ImageFFmpeg
    • Still pictures.Image file, image on web.
    • ImageBuff
    • Image from application memory.For computer generated images, drawing applications.
    • ImageViewport
    • Part or whole of the viewport (=rendering of the active camera displayed on screen).
    • ImageRender
    • Render of a non-active camera.
    • ImageMix
    • A mix of two or more of the above sources.In this example we use a simple video file as source.The VideoFFmpeg constructor takes a file name as argument.To avoid any confusion with the location of the file,we will use GameLogic.expandPath() to build an absolute file name,assuming the video file is in the same directory as the blend-file:
    1. movie = GameLogic.expandPath('//trailer_400p.ogg')
    2. GameLogic.video.source = bge.texture.VideoFFmpeg(movie)

    We create the video source object and assign it to the Texture objectsource attribute to set the source and make it persistent:as the Texture object is persistent, the source object will also be persistent.

    Note that we can change the Texture source at any time.Suppose we want to switch between two movies during the game.

    We can do the following:

    And then assign (and reassign) the source during the game:

    1. GameLogic.video.source = GameLogic.mySources[movieSel]

    The VideoFFmpeg source has several attributes to control the movie playback:

    • range
    • [start,stop] (floats).Set the start and stop time of the video playback, expressed in seconds from beginning.By default the entire video.
    • repeat
    • (integer).Number of video replay, -1 for infinite.
    • scale
    • (bool).Set to True to activate fast nearest-neighbor scaling algorithm.Texture width and height must be a power of 2.If the video picture size is not a power of 2, rescaling is required.By default bge.texture uses the precise but slow gluScaleImage() function.Best is to rescale the video offline so that no scaling is necessary at run-time!
    • flip
    • (bool).Set to True if the image must be vertically flipped.FFmpeg always delivers the image upside down, so this attribute is set to True by default.
    • filter
    • Set additional filter on the video before sending to GPU.Assign to one of bge.texture filter object.By default the image is send unchanged to the GPU.If an alpha channel is present in the video, it is automatically loaded and sent to the GPU as well.We will simply set the scale attribute to Truebecause the gluScaleImage() is really too slow for real-time video.In case the video dimensions are already a power of 2, it has no effect.
    1. GameLogic.video.source.scale = True

    Play the Video

    We are now ready to play the video:

    1. GameLogic.video.source.play()
    1. if hasattr(GameLogic, 'video'):
    2. GameLogic.video.refresh(True)

    If the video source is stopped, refresh() has no effect.The argument of refresh() is a flagthat indicates if the texture should be recalculated on next refresh.For video playback, you definitively want to set it to True.

    Video source classes (such as VideoFFMpeg) have an attribute status.If video is playing, its value is 2, if it's stopped, it's 3.So in our example:

    Advanced Workflow

    True argument in Texture.refresh() method simply invalidates the image bufferafter sending it to the GPU so that on next frame, a new image will be loaded from the source.It has the side effect of making the image unavailable to Python.You can also do it manually by calling the refresh() method of the source directly.

    Here are some possible advanced workflow:

    • Use the image buffer in Python (does not effect the Texture):
    1. GameLogic.video.refresh(False)
    2. image = GameLogic.video.source.image
    3. # image is a binary string buffer of row major RGBA pixels
    4. # ... use image
    5. # invalidates it for next frame
    6. GameLogic.video.source.refresh()

    • Load image from source for Python processing without download to GPU:

    • Note that we do not even call refresh on the Texture.

    • We could also just create a source object without a Texture object:

    1. image = GameLogic.video.source.image
    2. # ... use image
    3. GameLogic.video.source.refresh()
    • If you have more than one material on the mesh and you want to modify a texture of one particular material,get its ID:
    1. matID = bge.texture.materialID(gameobj, "MAmat.001")

    GLSL material can have more than one texture channel,identify the texture by the texture slot where it is defined, here two:

    1. tex=bge.texture.Texture(gameobj, matID, 2)

    Here is a demothat demonstrates the use of two videos alternatively on the same texture.Note that it requires an additional video file which is the Elephant Dream teaser.You can replace it with another file that you want to run the demo.