Setting up a 3D minimap (Godot 4/C#)

Let’s see how film our scene from two angles at once to give players a top-down and more abstract representation of the level!

Plunging your players into a strange virtual world can sometimes have them lose their bearings for a while… which is why a lot of games offer a minimap that gives a bird’s-eye view of the scene and helps people understand the overall structure of the level.

So in this tutorial, let’s see how to make such a minimap in Godot :)

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to use a second Camera3D node in one of your 3D scenes to film the level from a specific angle, and how to use Godot’s viewport tools to repaste the view of this camera on the screen in a particular spot!

Note that in this tutorial, I’m going to start from the little dungeon-kinda level we made in this previous episode of the series, where we discussed how to attach a 3D camera to our hero in an RPG- like fashion, without any wall clipping or collisions.

Creating a simple 3rd person camera (Godot 4)

As usual, since we’ll be coding our logic in C#, make sure that you have a version of Godot with .NET enabled.

Download a version of Godot with .NET support, to be able to program in C#! :)

And of course, don’t forget that you can get the demo scene and all the assets for this example on my Github 🚀 with all my other Godot tutorials :)

Also, the spaceships & icon assets are from Kenney’s library🚀

The tutorial is also available as a video — text version is below: