Phantom Shade now supports Unity 4+, Deferred Rendering, and HDR.
Phantom Shade is a shader that allows characters to be rendered, or mesh highlighted, behind other objects so your players can always see their characters. Phantom Shade can also be used for enemies so they don’t go missing. This is ideal for nearly any game type and is done efficiently. The mesh highlight color is adjustable and all shaders support casting and receiving shadows. The transparency is also controllable for the mesh highlight.
You don’t need to set anything up Phantom Shade does all the work. Simply set your character to the Phantom Shade shader and you’re done.
Phantom Shade won’t render in front of other characters so multiple characters can be used and still receive proper render behind shading.
Similar techniques are used in AAA games and now Unity users can do the same.
Can be used with Unity Free:
Best of all Phantom Shade does NOT require Unity Pro to use which is great for Unity Free users.
4 Shaders Included:
Diffuse Phantom Shade
BumpSpec Phantom Shade
Transparent Cutout Diffuse Phantom Shade
Transparent Cutout BumpSpec Phantom Shade
All shaders support all Pro image effects, global fog, and Unity’s built in fog.
Yes it adds another pass, but it only adds about 30% more because it’s not rendering the inside.
You don’t have to apply the shader to everything that’s on your character either, it could just be the minor detail or just the character model which makes it even less the 30%.
Phantom Shade is a shader not an image effect. Wall Vision Outline Image Effect is an image effect as it says in the title. That requires pro thus making it less efficient.
This doesn’t need pro and you can add image effects and get the same look.
Now we’re done with UniStorm Version 1.6 we can show Phantom Shade’s potential. Phantom Shade 1.1 has been submitted to the Asset Store which will support tiff and tga, or any other multi-layered textures. All have been tested and work.
On character models with multiple submeshes, will they occlude themselves, thus making a really weird phantom sub-shaded character even when he’s not behind anything?
For instance, lots of character models the head is a separate mesh than the body, to use a different skin shader. If they were both set to use the phantom, and you were looking top down, would part of the body go phantom because it was occluded by the head?
No I think you character will be fine. We also tested this on the soldier character model from the 3rd person shooter to make sure and that worked fine. Everything shaded correctly whether behind an object or not.
Just bought it and imported to Unity4 and it dosen’t work. Tried the Demo scene that comes with it out of the box and it just renders as normal. What am I doing wrong or is this not compatible. P.S. I have Pro…P.P.S. I just tested it into a brand new Project and it works. I will have to go through my other assets and see what is interfering with it.
That’s odd, let us know what was causing it if you figure it out. We tested importing it by using the Angry Bots demo and didn’t have any problems, I wounder what’s causing it. Let us know if you need any help.
Oh I didn’t realize that it doesn’t work in Deferred Lighting. That is what the problem was my camera was in Deferred Lighting in my project and only in forward in the New Project.
Yea, we will tried to get it figured out. We will also be be better supporting Unity 4. This will all be with the new 1.1 version of Phantom Shade. This update should be released early January.
