Outline effect unity

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

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.

Outline effect unity

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For a cube for example, the outline will look really bad and not even resemble an outline.

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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. Outline , or edge detection effects are most commonly associated and paired with toon style shading. However, outline shaders have a wide variety of uses, from highlighting important objects on screen to increasing visual clarity in CAD rendering. This tutorial will describe step-by-step how to write an outline shader in Unity. The shader will be written as a custom effect for Unity's post-processing stack , but the code can also be used in a regular image effect.

Outline effect unity

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:.

Time warp scan

Alternatively, you can render each object silhouette with a specific color if you want each object to have a different colored outline. The offset gets divided by the width and height of the screen to account for the aspect ratio of the screen. Since the difference between nearby depth values can be very small and therefore difficult to see on screen , we multiply the difference by to make it easier to see. Additionally, the blur pass should be done in 2 passes. 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. For this technique, the silhouette of an object gets rendered to a buffer. Note that depth is non-linear ; as distance from the camera increases, smaller depth values represent greater distances. Horizontal blur. Some new edges, notably those along the staircase's steps, are now visible, while some edges that were previously visible no longer are. Shaders written for Unity's post-processing stack have a few differences compared to standard image effects. This is the same fresnel mask that was used in the initial outlining technique using a rim effect. Having something explained in different ways is always useful. We first calculate two values, halfScaleFloor and halfScaleCeil. The clip space position which ranges from -1, -1 at the top left of the screen to 1, 1 at the bottom right can be interpreted as a the camera's view direction to each pixel, in clip space.

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.

Any model with sharp angles will have these kind of artifacts. A second common artifact is unwanted edges showing up on objects at small grazing angles. This equation is exposed in Unity as Mathf. This method can avoid artifacts with models that have sharp edges but the big downside is the manual setup involved since you need to generate custom normals for your mesh, although this process can be automated using a script that bakes the normals. Adding variable edge thickness via dilation can create strokes reminiscent of 2D illustration, as described in this paper by Pixar. If you select the OutlinePostProfile asset now, you will see that Scale has been exposed to the inspector. The result is a pretty nice-looking outline for objects with smooth corners such as spheres and capsules. We will first define it as float is our shader program, as usual. To generate outlines, we will sample adjacent pixels and compare their values. Some modulation has to be done to get rid of these artifacts. The following formula is used to form the outline. For a cube for example, the outline will look really bad and not even resemble an outline. The technique produces an outline that is always an inner line and is not visible outside of the object and so maybe shouldn't even be called an outline. Up until now, we have been using the built-in VertDefault as our vertex shader. 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.