How do I get a byte[] of the camera frame in unity?

Question

I am relatively new to Unity. I was wondering how I could get the byte[] frame of the virtual main camera in Unity.

I couldn't find any tutorials online?

Answer 1

See the example here:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Texture2D.ReadPixels.html

The idea here is to attach yourself to the render pipeline, using the callback OnPostRenderCallback(). Here you should have direct access to the frame buffer, and can directly read pixels from the active render target with destinationTexture.ReadPixels(...). Instead of the destinationTexture.Apply() (which uploads the texture to the GPU, which you do not require), you can just dump the content of the texture into a byte array: byte[] myRawPixelData=destinationTexture.GetRawTextureData().

Answer 2

You can use RenderTexture for this:

• Create render texture
• Set it as target texture
• Render the current camera view to this texture
• Set the camera's render texture to null if it is not needed
• Create Texture2d
• Read data to the created Texture2d (example can be found here)
• Get bytes from your Texture2d