Oultline shader like one in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

[wenglish]

Hey guys,

I am a out of my depth on this one. I want to have intractable objects in my game be outlined but not show through other objects. I also need an effect that will work on meshes with hard normals. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is the best example for what I’m after. Here’s a shot

See how the boxes outlines follow the contours of the table and vase? How can I do this?

Thanks!

[bgolus]

These work by rendering out an additional texture somewhere with the outlined objects drawn with a solid color and everything else black. Then run a Sobel (edge detection) shader over that.

This outline effect is very similar with the minor exception of the outlines not being occluded.

[FREE] [OPEN-SOURCE] Outline Effect

Update 2019-10-11: Hello guys! Sorry but it’s really hard to maintain an open source project while still working full time, I will do what I can… Someone has been working on the project and I just merged his changes. If you’re interested in seeing what has changed, check out the fork: GitHub - JimmyCushnie/Outline-Effect-but-its-faster: a fork of Outline Effect with improved performance For the latest version go to: GitHub - cakeslice/Outline-Effect: Outline Image Effect for Unity I will r…

You could probably use the _CameraDepthTexture to test for occlusion in the outline buffer shader.

The outline highlight Unity’s editor uses appears to work in a way similar to how I described above.

Selection outline

Here are the two files we use: This probably does too much compared to what you want to do (it does handling for picking and other things). But you can probably take this code and use it in your project with some modification. Basically: // Outline process: // 1. render selected objects into a mask buffer, with different colors for visible vs occluded ones (using existing Z buffer for testing) // 1a. objects also get an object ID which can be used to differntiate between differnt selection …

There are other techniques that render out explicit occluders, like this asset.

Highlighting System [Released]

Highlighting System package allows you to easily integrate outline glow effect for objects highlighting in your Unity project. [978242--39714--$teaser.png] Available in the Asset Store: Highlighting System | Particles/Effects | Unity Asset Store WebGL demo Documentation Hotfixes and Tips Development Trello Main features: Works as an Image Effect on Camera Compatible with Forward and Deferred rendering paths, HDR, Gamma and Linear Color Space, GPU Instancing Original renderer mate…

If you’re rendering using deferred (like Deus Ex) you might be able to use some custom shaders to draw the objects you want to outline into an unused gbuffer channel (either the alpha of the normal gbuffer, or the alpha of the emission gbuffer).

[wenglish]

Thanks for the info, although I am still lost… how do I draw the outlined objects separate from the rest of the scene while still keeping them occluded? I can separate them using “RenderWithShader” function, but then they are not occluded.

[bgolus]

You’ll need to look at the code I linked to.

[Xerrok]

@bgolus

The outline highlight Unity’s editor uses appears to work in a way similar to how I described above.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/638707/5

Do you know by any chance how to use this shader?
It seems to have no effect in my scene.

[bgolus]

@Xerrok

Do you know by any chance how to use this shader?
It seems to have no effect in my scene.

That shader isn’t going to do anything by itself, it needs to be used in a system like the other links I posted which renders objects out to a separate render texture, does one (or more) passes on that render texture, and then composites back into the scene.