Secondary Camera Feeds (RenderTexture + IMGUI)

Rendering an extra in-world camera (drone feed, security monitor, picture-in- picture) and putting it on screen in 7DTD. Pattern proven in the FPV mod (FPVDroneManager.CreateDroneCamera / CreatePilotCamera).

The pattern

1. new RenderTexture(w, h, 24, RenderTextureFormat.Default) + .Create(); a GameObject with a Camera whose targetTexture is that RT.
2. Copy render setup from Camera.main: cullingMask, clearFlags, backgroundColor, allowHDR, allowMSAA — a default-constructed camera does not match the game's.
3. Draw it from OnGUI with GUI.DrawTexture(rect, rt, ScaleMode.StretchToFill, false). IMGUI draws over the game view and the (hidden) vanilla UI.
4. Teardown: Destroy(camera.gameObject), rt.Release() + Destroy(rt).

Gotcha: clone the main camera's PostProcessLayer or the feed is dark/flat

The scene renders in linear color space and the main camera's PostProcessing-Stack-v2 PostProcessLayer (tonemapping, grading, auto-exposure) maps that to the final image. A bare secondary camera skips it → noticeably darker, flatter feed. Fix: add a PostProcessLayer to your camera and Init() it with the main layer's PostProcessResources, which is only held in the private field m_Resources (reflection). Copy volumeLayer, antialiasingMode, stopNaNPropagation; set volumeTrigger to your camera's transform so local post volumes apply at its position. (In FPV: ReplicateMainCameraPostFx(main, target) in FPVDroneManager.cs.)

PiP of the "real" view while a feed owns the screen

While a full-screen feed covers the display, the game's main camera keeps rendering the real world underneath (in FPV the player is flipped to third person, so it's an over-the-shoulder view of the operator's body). You can't cheaply grab that backbuffer from IMGUI, and leaving a "hole" in the overlay only shows a 1:1 corner crop, not a scaled-down frame. Correct approach: a second low-res camera (quarter screen res is plenty) that mirrors Camera.main each LateUpdate — SetPositionAndRotation(main.transform...) plus fieldOfView — into its own RT, drawn as a small rect in the HUD. Camera.main still resolves to the player camera (feed cameras are untagged), and the RT at screen/4 keeps the screen's aspect so the PiP rect should too. (In FPV: UpdatePilotCamera / FPVHudRenderer.DrawPilotPip, toggled by FPVHudSettings.PilotView.)

Layer trick: hide an object from one camera only

Put the object on a spare layer (FPV uses 31) via SetLayerRecursive and mask it out of that camera's cullingMask (mask &= ~(1 << layer)). Other cameras keep the full main-camera mask and still see it — how the drone body is hidden from its own onboard camera yet visible in the pilot PiP and to the player.

Related: [[Remote Camera World Loading (Drone FPV)]], [[Voxel Light & Scene Brightness]] (why night-vision boosts were abandoned in favor of post-fx cloning), [[IMGUI Tracker Stack]], [[HUD Safe Zones]].