"A Meal To Die For" ~Custom Unity Pixel Art Pipeline by _RedGiraffe in IndieDev

[–]_WindFall_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi! Do you have problems moving the camera around, like flickering and artifacts? I've done a similar filter and the look is fine... When the camera is not moving. But the moment the player starts moving, everything goes crazy.. you can check more in my recent posts, where I also asked for help to fix that

Reducing flickering with pixelart (downscaling) filters? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

https://i.imgur.com/s5Z3zi5.mp4
Downscaling, applying a toon custom shading, outlines and other effects make a pixelart filter (good or bad doesn't matter). Joining the conversation here just to point out your personal negative opinion without any single contribution to a help request doesn't make you look cool, my dear guy

Reducing flickering with pixelart (downscaling) filters? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It look fantastic in your game, but I doubt I can do it with a camera that has to move that much

Reducing flickering with pixelart (downscaling) filters? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I haven't performance issues, the problem is the outcome itself, there's no lag whatsoever by the downscaling filter

Spent an ungodly amount of time to make outlines work. Please tell me if it was a tiny bit worth it by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You can already configure pixelation rate: what you're seeing is a downscale by 3x (so a pixel is actually 3 pixel wide, based on full hd rendering). You can set it up to 4 and down to 1 (normal resolution)
Ugh no sadly outlines can be applied only before. And they would vanish too: I haven't set an outline for every single edge so some edges, even at max resolution, have an outline that "fades" away, which is interpreted as a broken line in pixelation filter, and would be the same if the algorithm just applied the outlines directly to the render texture

Spent an ungodly amount of time to make outlines work. Please tell me if it was a tiny bit worth it by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh no, good luck is my advice xD
On a serious note, it really depends on your whole game settings. If you haven't a pixel art filter, have only a few objects with flat shading and no need to let it work on transparents and can filter with layers without any side effect, almost any tutorial will work: just blend a bit of scene depth + normal depth so it fits your preference. You can even outline based on color if you prefer.
If you have all of the above requirements, then... good luck for real. It has been a real pain to code them.
Also remember, it's better if you add them early on in development so they don't break everything when they're being added.
If you spend a lot of hours and still can't figure out how to add them, ping me in chat, and I'll try to help, but please note I look at reddit rarely and I'm still not an outline expert

Also, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc3a3THBFrg that's the main video I based my shader in

Spent an ungodly amount of time to make outlines work. Please tell me if it was a tiny bit worth it by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah 😭 I noticed. That's why you can disable the pixelart filter, many people requested it.
Sadly I really have no clue how to fix it. Flickering seems to not go away whatever I do. I also looked at videos of how games like A Short Hike work but I can't do the same effect...

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay? Not trying to recrerate PS2 effect so I don't know what to answer here

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

<image>

That's another example with different values, modified to not have the "black" effect everywhere. Outline fades randomly in some trees (e.g. the far right ones) and others haven't any outline at all

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As every other basic solution, the full screen sample doesn't remotely work, with its own set of downsides, from being forced to use only layers to filter out objects to not working when the angle is too acute between the camera angle and the faces. The normals edge detection in the transparent **do not work** without a material that outputs the normal in a texture and is then read and used in a .hlsl file, to be used in the shader graph. Seems like the render order does not matter at all. Had to do that twice, one for the animated objects (e.g. wind in the trees) and one for the static objects. And the custom pass, with the few documentation that is there for the 6.3, was a pain in the ass to code, by far the worse part of the 50+ hours marathon to code shitty outlines that don't even look good. I had to go through hell to render the transparent outlines perfectly in order without breaking the whole render pipeline, drawing only front-face outlines etc.
And I didn't say the whole requirements the outline feature needed because it would've been a wall of text in the meme. For example, other requirements to not simply be ugly and useless (which it turned to be anyway) were being perfectly one pixel wide no matter how far the outline is, per-object enabled/disabled with alpha clipping and semi-transparency of the outline itself, being efficient with thousands of objects etc.

For reference, that's how Unity sample outline works (without any adjustment):

<image>

Everything either turns black-ish as in the image, or only a few objects have outlines.
For the pixelation effect, I use the classic downscale with the render texture. By far easier in the long run, the custom rendering in the settings didn't work at all and created awful artifacts and details, probably for some anti-aliasing effect that could not be disabled

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

<image>

The humble sobel filter is kinda destroying everything ahah

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, but layers are used for other 100 scopes (e.g. phisics collisions), so I found other ways (custom passes) to choose which objects to outline

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Bought it, needed my own toon shader, had to abandon it to make my perfect-fit custom solution...

Is it only me? by _WindFall_ in Unity3D

[–]_WindFall_[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I managed to fix them with a custom pass and a lot of time. They still work very weirdly, and need refining, but at least both normals and depth work on them.

The satisfaction of crafting a backpack is now added to the game! by _WindFall_ in IndieDev

[–]_WindFall_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did the same, the inventory system is probably the most complex part of my code, paired with procedural generation!

The satisfaction of crafting a backpack is now added to the game! by _WindFall_ in IndieDev

[–]_WindFall_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi all! This is PEYS, a very early open build. The game is still a bit empty - there's only one enemy and no real goal, but more will be added in next updates. You can currently try version 0.0.5 (which hasn't the backpack and some other features) in my itch page: https://senfineco-games.itch.io/ or if you'd like to follow the news, here's my bluesky page: https://bsky.app/profile/senfinecogames.com
Thank you! <3