Outline effect unity

You will learn to write a screen space shader to draw outlines around objects. This shader will be integrated with Unity's post-processing stack. Outlineor edge detection effects are most commonly associated and paired with outline effect unity style shading.

Rendering outlines is a technique that is often used in games either for aesthetic reasons or for supporting gameplay by using it for highlights and selections around an object. For example in the game Sable, outlines are used to create a comic-book-like style. In The Last of Us, outlines are used to highlight enemies when the player goes into stealth mode. However, when using it for rendering outlines, this physical meaning of the effect is not important. The following formula is used to form the outline. Then, this gets exponentiated with a power P P P.

Outline effect unity

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Having something explained in different ways is always useful. The operator only needs 4 samples around a given pixel.

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In this tutorial, we are going to create an outline effect for basic meshes using Shader Graph in Unity3D. We will encounter some restrictions of Shader Graph and learn how we can overcome this kind of restrictions. At the end of the tutorial, we are going to obtain the following effect:. In order to create an outline for an object, we render an additional image with the same geometry and scale it a little bit to obtain the outline. Nevertheless, we also need to prevent to render the pixels of the newly created image when both images overlap. Therefore, we will see an outline effect around the object. Each rendered image is created inside another Pass. However, multiple passes are not supported by the Shader Graph. Therefore we need a workaround to create an outline effect. A solution can be the following: We may instantiate a new copy of the main object, scale it a little bit and assign a new outline material to this new object.

Outline effect unity

Rendering outlines is a technique that is often used in games either for aesthetic reasons or for supporting gameplay by using it for highlights and selections around an object. For example in the game Sable, outlines are used to create a comic-book-like style. In The Last of Us, outlines are used to highlight enemies when the player goes into stealth mode. However, when using it for rendering outlines, this physical meaning of the effect is not important. The following formula is used to form the outline. Then, this gets exponentiated with a power P P P.

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This may sound weird but the vertex position in local space, can be seen as a vector between the center of the object and the vertex position itself and so we can move the original vertex position along that vector. The above process is very similar to what we did with depth, with some differences in how we compute the edge. The first step of this technique is creating the silhouette buffer. Download the starter project provided above, open it in the Unity editor and open the Main scene. We first calculate two values, halfScaleFloor and halfScaleCeil. We will be moving the vertices a certain distance along a certain direction. Lastly, we'll blend the color sampled from the scene with the outlines, using the alphaBlend function. To convert this to view space, we'll need access to the camera's clip to view , or inverse projection matrix. The duplicate object is usually just rendered with a flat color. This method being dependent on the normal vectors of the mesh is the most important downside.

You will learn to write a screen space shader to draw outlines around objects.

Using a blurred buffer is great for having soft or glowing outlines, but the buffer can also be stepped to render a hard outline. Also, if the normals of the mesh are not set up correctly and some of them are facing the wrong way, the vertices of the outline will be moved in the opposite direction, resulting in gaps in the outline. The Last of Us. To fix this, you can normalize the vector along which the movement occurs. We transform the view normal so that both normals are in the same range, and then take the dot product between the two. However, for other objects, these distances may vary and so vertices that are distanced further away from the center of the object, will get moved more. The view to clip called the projection matrix here is exposed in the Camera class. Before we multiply it into depthThreshold , we want to do one final transformation of the range. There are issues with sharp corners but these can be mitigated by using custom normals, which do require some extra setup. This duplicate object gets shown behind the original object and its vertices get extruded in order to make the duplicate object larger than the original one.