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 toon outline effect unity 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

.

This shader will be integrated with Unity's post-processing stack.

.

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. Concepts introduced here can be found in the Recolor effect from the Kino repository by keijiro , a Unity project that contains a variety of custom effects for the post-processing stack. To complete this tutorial, you will need a working knowledge of Unity engine, and an intermediate knowledge of shaders. These tutorials are made possible, and kept free and open source , by your support. If you enjoy them, please consider becoming my patron through Patreon.

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:. 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.

Master builder academy

Since we want to end up with the same outline after this transformation to screen space, we pre-multiply by this clip space w coordinate so that the perspective divide will have no net effect on the outline. There are several trivial ways to do this, from simply adding the two values together, to plugging them into the max function. 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. Another consideration is that when translating the vertices in object space, this is done in a 3D space. Final blended composition, with Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing set to High. For Roberts cross, the diagonal pixels get sampled and convolved with these kernels. Still, if not using custom-authored normals the method has issues with meshes that have sharp-corners, resulting in gaps in the outline. Add the following below the line declaring edgeDepth. 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. This will contain data that we will use to configure our outline effect. To improve performance, the silhouette buffer can be scaled down before blurring.

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 you could bake spherical smooth normals into vertex colors and use those for a cube mesh. You can switch the return value between the two to see the difference. Lastly, we'll blend the color sampled from the scene with the outlines, using the alphaBlend function. The source code for this shader is available in StdLib. Become a patron. Next, open the PostProcessOutline. We only take the r channel, as depth is a scalar value , in the Assigned to the Profile field of the volume is a post-process profile, OutlinePostProfile. Some edge detection algorithms work with grayscale images; because we are operating on computer rendered images and not photographs, we have better alternatives in the depth and normals buffers. To generate outlines, we will sample adjacent pixels and compare their values. We already have the normal, but we don't have access to the view direction. As well, the cubes in the background have no edges drawn between their silhouettes. These tutorials are made possible, and kept free and open source , by your support. However, outline shaders have a wide variety of uses, from highlighting important objects on screen to increasing visual clarity in CAD rendering.