Rendering Toon Outline with Post Process or GLSL

[Ameen A.]

Hello,

I'm making a toon shader using the Shader API, I'm trying to recreate a material we use in Unreal Engine to help our artist better visualize the results they'll be getting in engine. I was able to recreate most of what we need. But I wanted to check if its possible to create a toon outline by accessing the Depth and other buffers.

Basically I'm trying to use the bufferes to compare adjacent pixels and calculate the difference to create an outline. Is it possible to make a custom Post Process effect to calculate an outline? or access the buffers directly in the GLSL shader code?

Thank you in advance.

[Cyril Dellenbach · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ameen A.,

A real outline shader isn't possible with Substance 3D Painter because we don't have any post process effect.

With that being said, you will found online shaders that use the normal angle to draw lines on the surface of the mesh, like the fresnel would do. This is not really the same as an outline, but maybe this will interest you.

Best regards,

[Ameen A.]

Hello @Cyril Dellenbach,

I suspected this might be the case, thank you very much for the resource, maybe there's a way I can approximate it using that method.

Best regards,

Ameen