Glow effect?

Unity Engine
1

So is there a shader for a glow effect for unity iphone basic? basically I need to have there be a glow around an object. Thanks.

2

If you write one, then yes.
But otherwise, no.

What you are likely looking for technically in this case is an outline shader with transparency and a texture / effect that makes the glow part.
A postfx is not really an option as you don’t want to cut native resolutions of iphone 4 / ipad I guess

3

Ok thanks

4

Trick for fixed function pipeline hardware:

  1. render all objects that don’t have glows a bit darker, and all objects that do have glows are their glow colour to a low res buffer - to a texture
  2. render scene normally at native res
  3. render the texture over the scene stretched to full size, and at an acceptable blend mode and alpha, say add blend or such

It works quite well, but its very slow.

A fast method but less visually pleasing - this can be done in the 3d package or realtime, whatever is better for you:

  1. like the cell shading outline trick, you have a second copy of the mesh that glows, but with reversed normals and slightly larger. You can either scale the copy a bit bigger or for a nicer effect, push verts out by their normals. This mesh is rendered with a lower alpha value and additive or such blending.

  2. tint the original mesh colour to match the glow you’re trying to achieve.

The problem you face is that you’re on iPhone hardware. It’s really very slow at render to texture due to the fact the iPhone (all models) has a really poor fill rate. Shaders are your best bet if you’re targetting ES 2.0 though.

5

Ok, thanks.