Objects highlighting.

[lxFirebal69xl]

I've been looking into making specific objects highlight when the player gets close to them.

 

So far the closest thing I found is an old shader called edgeglow, but I have no clue how I would apply that to a model.

 

 

This picture is kind of what I'm going for, but not as intensive, more just the actual outline of the entities.

[macklebee]

A quick and dirty way is to make a copy of the object, scale it slightly larger, and flip its normals.

Script.highlight = Model:Load("Models/crates/crate_large.mdl", Asset.Unmanaged)

function Script:Start()

self.highlight:SetScale(1.01,1.01,1.01)

self.hmat = Material:Create()

self.hmat:SetColor(0,1,0,1)

self.hmat:SetSortMode(true)

self.highlight:SetMaterial(self.hmat)

self.surface = self.highlight:GetSurface(0)

self.surface:FlipNormals()

self.highlight:SetPosition(self.entity:GetPosition())

self.highlight:SetParent(self.entity)

end

 

A more complicated way involves rendering to another buffer/world, performing an edge-detection/cartoon post process shader on the scene, and then drawing the results to your main world.

 

Edit--Doing the quick and dirty way looks pretty decent once you set the zsort to true on the flipped material.

[Josh]

You know you could use the edge detection routine to write values into the emission texture, and that wouldn't require any special fancy setup.

[shadmar]

A model fresnel shader will also do this, but since it uses normals, stuff like boxes and other very low poly stuff wil look not so good.

 

A quick and dirty way is to make a copy of the object, scale it slightly larger, and flip its normals.

 

this is neat and requires no special stuff.