Rimlight outline overlay?

Unity Engine
1

Hi!

Which is the best way to render rimlight object outline on top of the others?
(To show contour of an object that has been overlapped)

I figured out that i can do it by:

  1. Rewriting all builtin unity surface shaders that i expect to use on my objects to a double-pass shaders in which 1st pass - is the normal shader pass (vertex+fragment analog of a surface shader program, cause Unity surface shaders doesn’t supply multipass) and second - is the rimlight outline pass, and replace shader in realtime with all necessary parameters.

That does the trick, BUT i don’t want to rewrite all surface shaders that i use on my objects with it’s vertex+fragment analogs. That’s a freaky solution…

OR

  1. Prepare 1 rimlight shader only for rimlight outline effect, and use Graphics.DrawMesh to draw object mesh 2nd time with this shader.
    That’s a better solution i think, BUT Graphics.DrawMesh doesn’t work with skinned meshes (or i’ve missed something?) :frowning:

In any case my rimlight shader contains ZTest Always to be drawn on top of all other objects.

And please note that i need to control properties of a rimlight material/shader at runtime from scripts for every single object.

Any other solution?

Thanks and sorry about my poor english. :slight_smile:

Trying to obtain this effect, but which works on skinned meshes too:

2

I’m sorry I don’t have anything to help you with, but I just have to say…

“Oooh… rimlight… <3”

3

Thanks Tuah :slight_smile:

Doh… Spend couple of hours implementing that… First solution isn’t that easy as i think… Need to rewrite all lighting in shader…

4

you could just make an extra light, and have it affect only that player, then you can mess with it as much as you like. I might have misunderstood the purpose :slight_smile:

5

Purpose is to have cool rim lighted contour of important objects (monster, player for example) independently of that they are closed from view by obstacles or not.

6

Are you referring to the rim light, like that used in Marvel Nemesis and Def Jam?

700×525 61.2 KB

7

twitchfactor it doesn’t matter. Just need to find the way on how to render this rimlight pass on top of all other objects with any builtin shader.

8

Tags {“Queue” = “Overlay”}

Try that? It’ll force it whichever pass or subshader you apply that to to be rendered after all other geometry.

9

Farfarer, thanks for the suggestion, but before i post this thread, i already knew what does “queue”=“overlay”.

Found one solution that works for me, but if guru’s one day will read this, i would like to know their opinion on how to achieve described results.