Ugly Text Outline

1px text outline looking good, but when I set more - outline looks ugly. Is It going to be fixed?

 

The text rendering will be updated after the 4.6 release according to the UI developers.

 

I hope so

 

Btw I definitely recommend Text Mesh Pro - it's absolutely the best solution I've used in -any- engine.
...Even if you do report it as spam

Unity's outline method will not be fixed, it's just drawing the same mesh behind offset which is slower and not the same solution as TMP uses, which is SDF, so it always knows its real outline.

I doubt a fix is coming for this, as the method is different.

 

I believe unity 4.6 uses 6 render pass to add a hard shadow, and an outline.
You also will get incorrect blending if the text is semie transparent.


So a little tech detail followup on the method TM Pro uses, and why its a nice alternative:

The text in the GIF is rendered using the following shader in a single pass (plain shader model 2.0)
Works on anything and everything.

The shader offer the following features:

- an ARGB outline with fractional pixel thickness control
- an ARGB gradient for the face
- Control of dilation of the face
- A shadow (secondary layer) with
- Softness control
- Offset
- Dilation
- ARGB color

Any and all parameter are animatable at run-time.

Yet the biggest benefit is the zero overhead/allocation for text rendered at any size,
so scaling text doesn't impact performance. (and its always pixel perfect)

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. fixed4 PixShader(pixel_t i) : COLOR
3.         {
4.             half d = tex2D(_MainTex, i.t0).a * i.p.x;
5.             fixed4 c = lerp(i.outlineColor, i.faceColor, saturate(d - i.p.z));
6.             c *= saturate(d - i.p.y);
7.             d = tex2D(_MainTex, i.t1).a * i.u.x;
8.             c += i.underlayColor * (saturate(d - i.u.y) * (1-c.a));
9.             return c;
10.         }
11.