[FREE] [OPEN-SOURCE] Outline Effect

The renderer is underneath the main avatar on a child game object, You'll need to look for the renderer using GetComponentInChildren<SkinnedMeshRenderer>(), assuming you put your script on the game object with the DCA.

 

It worked! Thank you, Jaimi.
Here is the code I've used (not sure if its the best):

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. private void Update()
3.     {
4.        
5.         if (!isUpdated)
6.         {
7.  
8.             if (transform.childCount > 0)
9.             {
10.                 foreach (Transform child in transform)
11.                 {
12.                     if (child.GetComponent<SkinnedMeshRenderer>() !=  null)
13.                     {
14.                         child.gameObject.AddComponent<cakeslice.Outline>();
15.                         isUpdated = true;
16.                     }
17.                 }
18.  
19.             }
20.         }
21.        
22.     }
23.  

 

Is it possible to draw outline only when object is behind an other specific sprite like house/wall?

for example:

i got a 2d top down game. all objects are sprites. now when a player is behind a house then it should draw the outline of the player behind the house.

right now when it put script on player. there is always drawn a outline anyway if player is behind an object or not.

 

Hello,

Many thanks for this very useful asset,
does anyone achieve to make it work with HDR activated ?

thx by advance

 

does anyone have any insight on to how i would go about smoothing these lines?

 

Thank you for great plugin!
Currently I'm facing an issue and not sure where to check.

When I use this with ARKit on mobile, outline effect doesn't appear.

- Outline effect + ARKit + run on iMac editor: works!
- Outline effect + example project + run on iPhone: works!
- Outline effect + ARKit + run on iPhone: No outline

Has anybody tried this with ARKit?
I'm a programmer so I can debug myself but no idea where to start first..
Even no error log is showing.

Thanks!

 

Almost perfect, a few quirks here and there that are easy to fix depending on the situation great work!

 

This is a very good outlining asset.

For reference if anyone wants to use it for VR, it's a bit expensive. In our profiler, it consumes 0.3ms with the effect disabled, and 1.0ms with it enabled on a few objects.

 

So, I believe I can help you with supporting single pass stereoscopic rendering (just had the problem where the right eye is offset and had to get it working). And it also looks more performant than the secondary camera technique.

Instead of using a secondary camera (the "outlineCamera"), I am now using the main camera with an initial CommandBuffer (the one that draws the objects to be outlined).

mainCam.AddCommandBuffer(CameraEvent.BeforeImageEffects, outlineCommandBuffer);

That outlineCommandBuffer then draws to a RenderTexture (along side the rest of the main camera's normal rendering) that I then use to apply the rest of the effects in OnRenderImage.

The only weird thing I saw was that the RenderTexture didn't clear properly, but I fixed that by putting a clear into the buffer at the beginning (after I assigned the RenderTexture).

outlineCommandBuffer.ClearRenderTarget(true, true, Color.black);

I hope this helps you and other people.

 

Any chance you could contribute your code to the Github repository here (I think via a pull request)?

https://github.com/cakeslice/Outline-Effect

 

I'm having this issue also in 2018.2.0b2
It looks like this asset and ARKit's UnityARVideo.cs both use command buffers, could there be a conflict there?
Or perhaps there's an issue with Metal?

I get this error
A null value was found where an object instance was required.
in xcode when i try and turn on the object outline script with:

this.gameObject.GetComponent<cakeslice.Outline>().enabled = true;

which suggests to me that the component is removed when built on iOS.

Does anyone know why this might be happening?

 

Dear sir,

May I know the possibility to get the information of object outline volume and position array from this asset? Thanks a lot.

 

Hi

I'm using the enable outline effect (with playmaker) on an asset that has no LOD's and it works fine but on an asset that is having LOD component and than use it on LOD0 (the closest will get outline when selected) and the script doesnt seem to react whan willing to disable the outline. enabling works fine tho but disable doesn't work for me with assets with LOD

 

If you're referring to the changes I mentioned, they weren't done to the cakeslice outline effect. So I don't have changes to submit.
The in house outline effect that I'm currently using is far simpler, but used to use the same technique (a secondary camera).

 

The outline's seem to be rendered ontop of everything else in my scene, see imagem atached.
Help-me!.

 

Hey There!

Really nice outline effect, thank you a lot!
I've also made a modified version, to use the outline effect to solve the issue of transparent insides of meshes when they are partially in the camera's near clip plane. I wanted to make it look like objects had a texture or color in them, so it's more realistic when my users move their cam through objects:



All this is is a small change in the OutlineBufferShader.shader (but needs a bit more work if you want to use the outline normally as well), if anyone is interested:

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader "Hidden/OutlineBufferEffect" {
2.     Properties
3.     {
4.         [PerRendererData] _MainTex ("Sprite Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
5.         _Color ("Tint", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
6.         [MaterialToggle] PixelSnap ("Pixel snap", Float) = 0
7.     }
8.  
9.     SubShader
10.         {
11.  
12.                 Tags
13.                 {
14.                     "Queue" = "Transparent"
15.                     "IgnoreProjector" = "True"
16.                     "RenderType" = "Transparent"
17.                     "PreviewType" = "Plane"
18.                     "CanUseSpriteAtlas" = "True"
19.                 }
20.  
21.                 // Change this stuff in OutlineEffect.cs instead!
22.                 //ZWrite Off
23.                 //Blend One OneMinusSrcAlpha
24.                 Cull Off////[_Culling]
25.                 Lighting Off
26.  
27.                 CGPROGRAM
28.  
29.                 #pragma surface surf Lambert vertex:vert nofog noshadow noambient nolightmap novertexlights noshadowmask nometa //keepalpha
30.                 #pragma multi_compile _ PIXELSNAP_ON
31.                 #include "UnityCG.cginc"
32.                 sampler2D _MainTex;
33.                 fixed4 _Color;
34.                 float _OutlineAlphaCutoff;
35.  
36.                 struct Input
37.                 {
38.                     float2 uv_MainTex;
39.                     float3 vertexNormal;
40.                     float3 vertexPosition;
41.                  
42.  
43.                  
44.                     //fixed4 color;
45.                 };
46.  
47.                 void vert(inout appdata_full v, out Input o)
48.                 {
49.                     #if defined(PIXELSNAP_ON)
50.                     v.vertex = UnityPixelSnap(v.vertex);
51.                     #endif
52.                  
53.                     UNITY_INITIALIZE_OUTPUT(Input, o);
54.                     o.vertexNormal = UnityObjectToWorldNormal(v.normal);
55.                     o.vertexPosition = mul(unity_ObjectToWorld, v.vertex).xyz; ;
56.  
57.                  
58.                  
59.                  
60.                  
61.                 }
62.                 bool isFacingForward(float3 vertexNormal, float3 vertexPosition) {
63.                     return dot(normalize(UnityWorldSpaceViewDir(vertexPosition)), vertexNormal) <= 0;
64.                 }
65.  
66.                 void surf(Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o)
67.                 {
68.                     fixed4 c = tex2D(_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex);// * IN.color;
69.                     if (c.a < _OutlineAlphaCutoff ) discard;
70.  
71.                     float alpha = c.a * 99999999;
72.  
73.                     o.Albedo = _Color * alpha;
74.  
75.                     o.Alpha = alpha;
76.  
77.                     if (!isFacingForward(IN.vertexNormal, IN.vertexPosition))
78.                         o.Albedo = fixed4(0,0,0,0);
79.  
80.                     o.Emission = o.Albedo;
81.                 }
82.  
83.                 ENDCG
84.  
85.                  
86.             }
87.      
88.      
89.  
90.     Fallback "Transparent/VertexLit"
91. }

 

Hi! Nice asset

Is there any way to make this work with a canvas renderer (in this case, a Raw Image element)... or at least the 'Erase Renderer' part? I'm displaying a top-down othorgraphic view that shows the outlines on various objects, but the camera also has a canvas attached using 'Screen Space - Camera'. The outline shows above my UI elements, one of which is showing a rendertexture view from another camera using RawImage in a UI element in the top right corner. The objects are obscured by the UI element but the outlines are still visible. (See Image)

Many thanks for any help!
Alex.

 

Hi there.

I'd like to make the color and materials be assigned to the Outline component, rather than the OutlineEffect comonent. Right now I can only fade in/out 3 objects at a time with the 3 colors in the OutlineEffect.

Is this a bad idea? Any recommendations on achieving independent colors for more than 3 Outlines?

Thanks.

 

Hi,
I have been using this asset in my project and have found out that this causes a huge fps drop in my game on android. I hope it's not only me who is facing this issue. What do you guys think about the mobile performance issues with this effect ?

 

Hey there,

Sorry to bother you guys. But I seem to be getting a little issue here. The Outlines on my sword look a bit off. Sorry for the poor image quality. PS: I have not been using unity long so just getting the ropes.

 

Here is a more extreme example of my issue.

https://imgur.com/a/PGENdsa

 

We used this for mobile and it has been simple to implement. We had some inconsitant testing results on whether it is working on iPhone. As it turns out, it works on iPhone running iOS9-10.x - It is not working on iPhone X (2017) running iOS11.X We are not sure if it is GPU or OS. Does anyone know how the renderer works and if we can find a tweak for iPhoneX/iOS11+.

 

Hello. Thank you very much for the asset. It is really useful. I have a problem I hope you could help me with.
I have two cameras (First / Third Person) and I switch from one to another. I have attached the Outline Effect Script on both of them. Also I have around 20 objects that I wanted to outline so I attached them the Outline Script. I also have attached to these objects another script that on Start and onMouseExit disables the Outline Script and onMouseOver enables it.
The problem is when I make the camera switch twice, the second time I do it all objects have the Outline Script enabled obviously without the mouse being over them.
What might be the problem?
TEMPORARY SOLUTION: I had to set enable to false of the component of the paintings and of the previous active camera and true for the forthcoming active camera. It still has a problem when a painting is outlined and camera changes.

 

Did you find a fix to this problem as I have the same issue.
I have many objects with the outline script attached and NOT enabled.
Somehow these scripts become enabled not only at runtime but after the project is stopped and you are in design time.
Manually setting enabled=false in awake or active is not an option, it's a hack.
Does anyone know code is making these active?

Thanks.

UPDATE

I found the culprit in OutlineEffects.cs

Change the following code and comment out the interior:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.         private void OnEnable()
3.         {
4.             /*
5.             Outline[] o = FindObjectsOfType<Outline>();
6.  
7.             foreach(Outline oL in o)
8.             {
9.                 oL.enabled = false;
10.                 oL.enabled = true;
11.             }
12.             */
13.         }

It's designed to cascade any enable changes to the main outline effects on the camera down to the outline scripts on the objects. This makes sense if you disable it. But it does not make sense for a lot of other circumstances like highlights starting as disabled.

 

Is there any way to Outline working without "shaking" when TAA is ON?

 

I have same problem - did you solve this? If you do, please share the solution. I'll appreciate that

 

Awesome.. How Can i use Erase Option? Please help

 

In Unity 2018.3.0f2 the Line Thickness property does not seem to work. It's always the same, regardless of setting.
And btw: Thanks for this great script.
It might be relatively performance intensive, but for my current newbie-project, it works just fine.

 

I had the same problem, and corrected it by creating a secondary camera in the exact same place as my main camera, without TAA, and putting it as the Source Camera in the Outline Effect script (which stays on the main camera).

 

Hi!! i was wondering a simple hack to draw the outline inside the object pixels and not outside!! Thanks in advanced

 

ivan_tbl wrote:
When I add a png as a texture, the Erase Renderer option stops working. Once the outline is there, it won't go away.
But if I manually remove the png during play mode, all goes back to working perfectly.

Hello,

I have the same problem as described by ivan_tbl. When in runtime I check/uncheck Erase Renderer flag, the object erases outline effects of outlined objects located behind. That works fine if there is no texture assigned to the object that erases outline. But when I assign texture and check/uncheck Erase Renderer flag the outline effects doesn't disappear.

We would appreciate any support.

 

Hello guys, I've attached the fix for this issue. Just replace the OutlineEffect.cs file with this one.

Cheers!

 

Hi there,

I'm working on a project that was just switched to LWRP, and it seems that all outlines have simply disappeared.
I am at a bit of a loss here because I'm getting no errors or anything, just no outlines :/

Anyone have an idea of how to deal with this?
Thanks! =D

 

Really useful asset, thanks for providing it. Took me a while to realize you were using a different namespace, but everything went smoothly after that

 

Hi, thanks for the great plugin!

In outlineEffect.cs, onPreRender() you check for

Code (CSharp):

1. outline.Renderer.sharedMaterials[v].mainTexture != null

but it looks like this still throws an error if the material doesn't have a main texture? Maybe also check for this?

Code (CSharp):

1. outline.Renderer.sharedMaterials[v].HasProperty("_MainTex")

Cheers

 

Same issue here

 

Hello! First of all, thanks for this amazing asset.
I think I found a bug: when enabling the script OutlineEffect in the camera, it disables and reenables all outlines in the game, even the ones disabled in the first place. A if command will fix this:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. private void OnEnable()
3.         {
4.             Outline[] o = FindObjectsOfType<Outline>();
5.  
6.             foreach(Outline oL in o)
7.             {
8.               if(oL.enabled) {
9.                 oL.enabled = false;
10.                 oL.enabled = true;
11.               }
12.             }
13.         }
14.  

 

Hi Cake Slice! Firstly, I want to thank you for this wonderful asset. Simple and easy to use! I have implemented this asset more or less successfully into my project. However, I have two questions:

1) Is this asset supported in Unity's lightweight render pipeline? If it does, I added the scripts to the camera and the outlined object, is there something else that needs to be done?

2) Is there a way to separate outline between game objects? Or is some setting in my project wrong?

 

I managed to find a way. turns out most of the problems i here can be solved through toggling a few bools in the scripts through the editor. So sorry!

 

However, I found other problems! Before I continue, I realize and apologize for not stating that my project is 2D based, and my sprites/animations are done using Spine.

I realize that a second camera (outline camera) is used to render a compiled texture of the gameobjects that has the "outline" script. I do not want my weapon trails to be outlined, so I made the weapon trails using particle system.


So far I have gotten what I want, except :
1) I managed to include the particle meshes into the Outline classes. But I prefer if it followed the sprite's alpha. Is there a way to do this?
2) If the mesh is behind the character, it will still cause the outline to be removed. For the character sprite I modified a standard surface shader to have backface culling (to deal with the flipped sprites). Before when I used the default Spine shader it ignored the mesh and z position of the sprite (so the trail is rendered on top of the sprite, even though it was behind it when viewed from the 3D view). Please let me know how I can overcome this problem.


I think another way to solve both these problems, is to somehow draw the outlines beforethe rendering of the particles (weapon trails). I used the frame debugger to figure out when it was drawn -- but I really have no idea how to change it. Hoping you could help me with an easier alternative!

 

FYI I'm pretty sure FindObjectsOfType won't return inactive objects.

 

Hi great asset!

It is literally the only solution ive found that works to outline a flat mesh where all the normals are in the same direction.

Im using it to create a "Spell indicator" system... that being said, is there anyway to stop the outline from rendering over all my other objects without having to put the outline script and setting it to erase on literally every GameObject that has a renderer?

 

This doesn't seem to work for Unlit textures - the outline does not show on mobile for Vuforia though it works in editor

 

Did you make it work in LWRP? If so, how?

 

I would also like to know this. I recently switched to using LWRP and I'd like to know if this outline effect asset is still compatible.

 

How i can have multiple Outline with different Colors and Far Camera property ?

 

I wish the outline can work without the camera and visible in scene view.

 

@cakeslice @JimmyCushnie I saw that there's a fork on GitHub with quite some changes that sound to make sense. Any chance to get these PRed into the "main" repository?

 

Hi!
Is it possible to use "Erase Render" objects only if they are in front of the object?
This is my problem.

Even if the door is behind, it hides the effect.
It solves?

 

Hi I'm trying to get this to work with a AR setup with no luck so far, is it possible?