How to apply a shader to a whole animation rig, instead of the individual parts?

Pretty much what the title says.

I'm working on putting together my animation rigs using the 2D Animation package, and I'd like to apply an outline around the whole thing, but I can't seem to wrap my head around how to do it. My only guess would be to render all rigs that need to be outlined onto a texture using a camera then shading that, but that seems a little hacky, I just can't see how I could make a shader "aware" of other parts of the rig overlapping with it.

Are there any better/more efficient ways of treating an animation rig as one object? For example, is it possible using Unity to create a frame buffer object or something that can be rendered to?

 

I'm fiddling with same thing. I kind of have a solution. It's raw and needs some streamlining but here it goes. I'm guessing you already have a Outline Shader.

For every part that's going to be outlined in object, duplicate child objects that has SpriteRenderer and SpriteSkin component. Change those objects' Renderer Order layer to -100 (or to an order number that make sure it's behind).
Now when you apply your outline material to these duplicate renderers, overlapping sprites' outlines will be under main renderers.

Because SpriteSkin component feeds deformed sprite mesh to SpriteRenderer I guess won't be any major issue with this approach.

 

I have created an example on how to apply a shader to multiple sprites based on a similar reiquest from here https://forum.unity.com/threads/add...ased-on-multiple-sprites.863101/#post-7730607

Sample project:
https://github.com/albertferras/unity-2d-rigging-shader/tree/master