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. Outline effect unityor 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.

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. It is important to note that this is only an approximation of the fresnel effect, but it works well for our outlines.

Outline effect unity

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These are the normals of the objects relative to the camera. During the vertex stage of our shader, the coordinates of the vertices start out being defined in object space and end up being transformed to clip space. The x coordinates are stored in the red outline effect unity, while the y coordinates are in the green channel.

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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

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.

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To convert this to view space, we'll need access to the camera's clip to view , or inverse projection matrix. To achieve this, we will use the dot product. I recommend reading this post on creating an outline in clip space. As our normalFiniteDifference values are vectors , and not scalars , we need to transform them from a 3-dimensional value to a single dimensional value before computing the edge intensity. We will compute the sum of squares of the two values; this is part of an edge detection operator called the Roberts cross. Then, this gets exponentiated with a power P P P. Before we multiply it into depthThreshold , we want to do one final transformation of the range. While this has eliminated the dark greys, it has created a few issues. Detecting discontinuities can be done by using an edge detection operator such as the Roberts cross operator. To fix this, you can normalize the vector along which the movement occurs. A third method is to move the vertices along their vertex color. 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. The duplicate object is usually just rendered with a flat color.

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.

This shader implements the fresnel effect and allows us to set the width, power, softness and color of the outline. We will once again take the difference between these samples to detect outlines. It is also possible to provide the outline shader with a custom discontinuity source. During the edge-detection pass, these textures are sampled and discontinuities are detected using the edge detection operators mentioned earlier. For this approach, the objects that need to have an outline get rendered using a custom shader. As a second step, the vertex gets translated along its normal vector. As the difference can be positive or negative, we take the absolute value of it before returning the result. As we are working with a screen space shader, the view direction in clip space can be easily calculated from the vertex position. We will compute the sum of squares of the two values; this is part of an edge detection operator called the Roberts cross. Some modulation has to be done to get rid of these artifacts.