Thanks, Rexx! I really appreciate that, as it's the thing I try to focus the most. ^^

Thanks! Just a heads up, I don't post only tutorials, I also do some art stuff using Unreal and post the videos. But I'll soon be back on making tutorials. Gotta make time in between jobs.

Thank you! I always wanna know the "why", not just the "how". So that's how I try to explain stuff. Because if you know the "why", you might use it to solve something else.

And now that you know the concept, you can even do new stuff with the acquired knowledge :D

I'm very happy to help ^_^

Thanks! I'm also not very fond of "do this and that" tutorials. I wanna know WHY to do this and that. Why press this button instead of the other one?

Exactly :) by understanding how it works I managed to modify it to suit my needs, for example making it work with multiple outlines on top of each other (as you mentioned at the end of the video). By the way, I'm looking forward for your next tutorials! :D

Thanks! I'll tru to get back to them, but right know I need to be able to pay the bills, so I'm drowning myself in freelancing. But I still have a big list of tutorials to make.

Thanks, Sven! I believe knowing the "why" besides the "how" helps us create other things from the same concepts.

That's great, man! Happy to help

Thank you for letting me know! 🫶 I really strive to teach the why, not just the how. That way you can get this new knowledge and apply it to a different problem.

@@RVillani you nailed it with this one. I shared it to a couple of colleagues. I really hope you can afford to do this more often

@@NJoint Thank you for the kind words! I hope so too. I was very frustrated with my latest videos. The audio was bad (don't know how I didn't notice that while editing) and I feel like I'm not explaining things in a clear manner. Because of that I've been holding off on making more content until I figure out why I became so terrible at explaining this stuff.

Great! Glad I could help! :D It's greatly appreciated if you share it wherever you can! ^_^

If you could explain how you did that it would seriously help me out.

You can measure the distance between the object and the camera using the custom depth output. Then, take that value, subract your minimum required distance from it, ceil, clamp to 0~1 then use 1-x (OneMinus) on the result. Multiply that by the outlines alpha. So, if the distance is less than the required (ie., you're close to the object), the result will be 1 and it will show the outlines. If it's any greater (you're far), the result will be 0 and the outline will be removed.

I just used an overlap volume, and have overlap enable/disable custom render

Hahahaha that'll work too XD But for several objects at different locations, you'd need more overlaps.

Till Mohr Thanks! =D

GOD

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Thank's man.

Its saved me!thank brother!!

Glad to help! :D I will start making them again. Just gotta complete some stuff before (work and a Broly model in Unreal)

Thanks for the feedback, Zio! :D I'm glad it helps!

Thanks a lot!! I'm happy to help the Unreal community! :D

Thank you, Matthew! Yeah, man. Sometimes I appreciate quick videos that just show me how to do what I want ASAP, but on mine I like to show the why's too, so you can use the knowledge to create something else.

Hugo Gómez Cervantes Thanks a lot! I'm currently working a lot and there's not much free time, but I'll get back to them some day. I do miss doing it.

Sabselol Wow! Thanks a bunch! =D

Thanks for letting me know! What was it that you needed?

@@RVillani Rendering the side of an actors with custom stencil that is not behind walls or any mesh (28:07)

Thanks a lot, Bojan! I'm using 4.15

Gracias, Alberto!

Cr4zy Dude cool! It's a small world indeed! :D

Haha awesome!

I'm glad you think so! I've been teaching programming to my cousin and I always feel like I mumble too much. haha But that might be due to me not planning our classes ahead. 🤔

You could have a Lerp in the material in which 1 uses the effect and 0 doesn't. The Lerp alpha would be controlled by a Material Parameter Collection parameter. Than you could set that parameter's value from Blueprints.

Thanks! :D

Glad to help!

Thank you!! Glad to help!

Arlen der Dichter I'm very happy to help! ^_^

I really appreciate it! I have another question though. Everything works fine now, but I would also like to add a colored silhouette to the outlines, as to basically fill them with a different color tone. In the video you are at one point seperating the inner shape from the outline, so I tried to use that to create my desired effect, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Maybe you could give me a hint on how to do it? :)

Arlen der Dichter you mean to tint the object itself? There's a part where you detect what's inside and what's outside the object, so you'd use the inside as an alpha to lerp the final color with the tint you want. I can't really see it in detail right now (traveling), but if it's not clear, tell me and I'll try to explain better when possible.

The Lerp already helps, but somehow I cant manage to get the desired effect. I have been able to get outlines and fill my character, but then the rest of the world had a tint as wenn. Also I could no longer use the two color system you set up in the video. A more detailed explanation would be greatly appreciated, but don't stress yourself. if you dont have the time :)

Well, approx. by 23:00 I showed how to get only the objects as white. So you can multiply this result by your Lerp tint alpha in order to tint only the objects.

If you were asking how to do that, that's pretty much what I'd have suggested. A stencil value for "ignore this". I don't think there's another way if you can't tell those objects apart. Thanks for that comment!

thanks for the kind words :)

É nozes! XD

Que bom! Fico feliz em ajudar! :D

Hmm, the problem was fixed when I swapped from using the normal "Camera" component to using "CineCamera" component. The normal camera probably has some rendering/post process settings which caused my issues.

nvm. i found a way to make it :)

Oh also in the screenshot you'll see that further objects have thinner outlines than nearer ones. This was easy to accomplish. Not only that, but I have it adjust for your screen resolution as well. i.imgur.com/loG4CLJ.png This should explain it.

Very good, man! :D

Thanks for your input. I've managed to implement the overlapping outlines based on your screenshots.

np, glad I could help

Thank you this was really helpful, do you know how to avoid the x-ray on the outlines when other objects are occluding them?

Thanks! Good question. The floor has to render into the depth buffer, otherwise it'd be a translucent material, wasting performance by rendering everything behind it. So it should be there in the Scene Depth. That said, you might be able to mask out lines on top of it by rendering the floor mesh(es) with a custom depth stencil. Then you could test in the post process material if the scene pixel also has that stencil value, and if so, don't display an outline there.

Thanks! It doesn't affect the mesh material. You just need to activate custom depth on the mesh, but its materials remain untouched. So the original material will still be there.

ok, thanks a lot, i have to try to reproduce all your actions first. Maybe later will have some more questions.

You mean like highlighting the object? Well, it's been a while that I did this, but if I'm not mistaken there's a part that output's 1 or 0 if inside of the object. You can use that (multiplied by 0.5) as the alpha for a Lerp between the original SceneColor and your highlight color.

Thank you! ^^

@@RVillani Actually there's one more thing I wanna ask. What's the differences between Scene depth and Scenetexture.Scenedepth nodes? Also I feel like pixeldepth and scene depth are similar, they all do output the distance between camera and the rendered pixels right?

Not sure how they work, just want to point out that the one we're meant to use here is the ViewportUV one

Smith will suffice. I hope you got that reference haha Nah, I'm just a long time UE4 user trying to give something back to this community that helped me get where I am ^^

Thank you! You're in luck! Because this technique only generates inlines (so contours only on top of the outlined meshes) you can get those meshes distances from the camera (custom depth map) and subtract it from your desired max distance. The result will be negative for meshes further away and positive for the ones closer. Than you can use Saturate on that result to clamp between 0 and 1 and use it as a mask (lerp or multiply) for the outlines.

@@RVillani Thank you soo much 😃☺☺

I'm not sure about that because water is a translucent shader, usually. I think you'd have to enable depth writes for it on the water material settings and then have the water mesh render to the same custom stencil channel as the character. Or a different channel that you account for in the post process and use it to hide the outlines.

Thanks! I'm kinda busy these last months (need money to make tutorials xD), but I'll try to get back to making tutorials as soon as I can.

of course, earning money is top priority. but your tutorial is also valueable. I learn much knowledge about why to do something, not just how to do.

Thanks! Yeah. I don't like those tuts where they just say what buttons to press. You gotta know why you're doing stuff.

yes, we all want to know what happen behind the back of node. just like what you painted about background knowledge of outline in the tutorial.

Maybe the offset values are miscalculated somehow? Could be many things. I advice you preview each node in your sequence of nodes to see if they display expected results. If you need to see specific numbers, you can use the debug nodes and preview them (Debug Scalar, Debug Float2 and so on). That way you debug where things are going wrong in the logic and find what needs fixing.

I finally got my nodes right, so what i did was: Custom depth - Scene Depth, then put that into ceil and then clamp bethween 0 to 1. Then I masked R and then did a "oneminus". This then got put into the multiply node that was put into the lerp alpha :)

Nice one! Sorry I didn't answer before. I think I missed the comment notification :( There were some people who asked something similar, I think. But KZfaq's comment ordering is weird, so it's a bit hard to find it. Thank you for the compliment on your first comment as well! 🫶🏻

You ever found a solution for this?

The logic you use to detect the outlines between custom depth and non-custom depth objects, you'll have to use it to detect outlines between different custom depth values

I've been trying to do this for a while but I think I'm still not undertanding how this works well enough to do it. From what I understood, you get the outline between custom depth and non-custom depth because the addition of the 8 texels around the one we're on gets very high if even a single one is in a non-custom depth area. I assume that if you're comparing two objects with custom depth enabled the difference between the numbers is going to be much smaller, but I'm not sure of how much. How do I figure out what is the number I should subtract to the final addition for this to work?

In recent versions, I think so. There's an option in the material details to make a translucent material write to custom depth. I haven't tested it, but I suppose that's what it's for.

If you only want to render the entire object in a different colour, you don't really need any calculations. You just use the subtraction between custom depth and scene depth, use OneMinus to invert it, and use that result as the alpha of a Lerp between the SceneTexture (the PostProcessing0 one) and any colour you choose. You can look at this tutorial from the UE people here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gK5gat1qptaVmJ8.html If you actually need both the outline and the entire object (like at different times you want one or the other), i would try playing with the line thickness parameter. Since the outline always grows inwards, there's got to be a value at which the whole object is 'painted' 🙂

From the ScreenPosition node make sure you are using the Viewport UV pin to connect to the add nodes - there are two pins in more recent engine versions compared to just one as in this video.

did you find a solution to this?

Thank you! Yes. You can lerp the final result with the original scene color. The lerp amount will be the alpha

Big Thanks, Rodrigo! It works!

I believe it can be Project Settings > Engine > Rendering > Postprocessing > Custom Depth with TemporalAA Jitter It's enabled by default. Try disabling it.

Unfortunately, still same jitter after disabling/enabling the option.

What about Rendering > Default Settings > Anti-Aliasing Method If it's not that, then I really don't know. Does it shake even with the camera and objects completely still?

I experienced the same thing, To fix it, open the material and go look in the parameters for the "Post Process Material" section. Inside there is an option "Blendable location": select "Before tonemapping"

Good one! I didn't remember that. It'll make you post process be calculated before the anti-aliasing pass, if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks! Check if the custom depth value is higher than the scene depth. If it is, your custom depth mesh is behind some other scene object, because those values are the distance from the camera. An easy way to mask it out is to do: • SceneDepth - CustomDepth • Clamp (0, 1) • Plug the result into a Ceil node Now you'll have 0 if it's behind something and 1 if it's not. You can use that with a multiply or a Lerp to mask other effects.

ok I finally manage do it! thank you!!! (I didn't except you would have respond to my comment :D)

Matty37Casa nice! I was gonna send you an email, but when I had the time. Glad you managed to do it =)

i was having the same problem but doing SceneDepth - CustomDepth was just removing the outline completely. so i tried adding a 1-x node after the clamp/ceil and it inverted the result and now the outline is only when objects are visible and not when behind something else. while im at it, can i change the size of the outline? i wanted to make it just a little bit bigger.

Would you please spell this out for me? I'm having the same issue with the outline showing through objects in front of it. What exactly does this modification look like and where do you plug this in at? Thanks!

What a good guy ^

No. If is bad for performance. For anyone with that problem, use "Start Previewing Node" on each node of the process to find where the mistake is. A "fix" will only create more operations on top of something wrong.

@@RVillani I was wonder if you knew about an issue that I'm having. The issue is even my character is 30 meters away he has a very thin outline when not occluded. Do you happen to know a fix for that? I'm in 4.21. Thank you

@@Righteous_Destiny doesn't sound familiar. Is the character too thin or small? Can you share a screenshot?

@@RVillani Thank you so much for the reply! I figured out the ossue it was the temporal AA that was causing the issue

Thanks! It's Cold Killa (Sting) from the KZfaq Music Library

That's an excellent question. I've never thought about it that way. I just found a bunch of tutorials with different techniques that helped me decide what worked best for me with the tool I have (Unreal, in this case). When you read about different ways to do the same thing, I think the theory comes as a consequence, because you start to realize what works better for certain situations, why it is so and with that knowledge you can even start creating your own way of doing it. That all said, I guess you could read about image processing with kernels to understand a bit more about this kind of effect. Sharpening is a similar technique to edge detection.

Oops my bad, the "Screen Position" node have now 2 outputs, and I did plug it in the second one rather than the first one ! The first one worked finally ! Sorry for the inconvenience !

Thanks for posting this, it really helped save me some time! To anyone else who reads this, for clarification, you want to use "ViewportUV" NOT "PixelPosition".

Im on 4.21 and I’m getting the same thing, but all of my nodes are correct. When he shows the different previews of what should happen, my results are all the same except for the step at 24:43.

I figured out a way to fix it. I have a comment that’s not a reply to you, you can find how there

What if you add equipped items to the effect with the character? Then instead of blocking, it glows with them.

I was just adding values there, so if the 8 samples are from 1/8 of the background distance (the 100km), it adds up to background distance. So I guess we're both incorrect XD The right thing to do would be to get max from all samples. Because the real intention was just to find if background is among the sampled pixels. That would really make sure it works up to 100km, not just 1/8 of it. I should've realized it back then. Thanks for calling it out and making me think again about it :D

@@RVillani To be fair this kind of calculations blow my mind, All yesterday I was trying to understand how it worked even though you given clear explication. Trying to think per pixel is so un natural to me

@@nawakman IKR! the way we have to think when making shaders is pretty unique

I don't think so. You could enable Allow Custom Depth Writes in the translucent material settings to get it to render its depth, but then you won't have the custom depth from the occluded object. It would only be possible if translucent materials rendered to the depth buffer, but if they did, they'd make things behind them not render at all.

thanks! Could be many things. The objects in play mode could be having stencil or custom depth disabled, for some reason. Or your player camera is overriding post process settings and disabling the PP material. Or something attached to the camera is drawing custom depth covering all the custom depth in the scene. Or you were testing from inside a Post Process Volume that's not set to infinite bounds, but in play you're outside of it. Or in your material you set some parameter during play that disables the effect. Or even something else specific to your project that I'd never guess haha You'll have to debug. While playing in the editor viewport, you can press F8 to eject from your player into level-editing mode. Then you can select things in the viewport or in the World Outliner and inspect their details to see if the expected depth/stencil settings are set on the meshes. You can also select your pawn/character and inspect its camera to see if it's overriding any post process settings. While ejected, you can also change the viewport mode from Lit to other view modes and see if stencil and custom depth look as expected. To go back into possessing the character, press F8 again.

Check if your Alpha input is not a value with more than one channel. For instance, the white pin out of a color node has 3 channels. The pin out of a TexCoord node has two. You can only use single channel values (floats) on Lerp's Alpha input. To check that, use a ComponentMask node on it, turn on Preview for that node and activate one channel at a time to see if they're outputting something. Thanks!

I managed to fix it by changing the following project option: Project Settings> Engine> Rendering> Postprocessing> Activate the option: "Custom Depth with TemporalAA Jitter"

In the material, you can also set Blendable Location to "Before Tonemapping"

Thanks! I didn't understand what you're trying to do. If it's visible behind the wall, it's visible to the character. Right?

@@RVillani :(( Sorry for my poor English... Easy to say, what I want just not effect on the character.

Can I contact you any way? I'm using outline to add people in a scene as just figures but when they pass in front of each other they overlap and it is not ok but I can not fix it.

​@@diegososa3912 You could contact me here: rvillani.com/bio-contact There's more than just e-mail there, but I won't post here to avoid spam. But I've been very busy. :( I have another tutorial (not in english though) that uses a technique on the stencils that displays only one color at a time. The problem with that technique is that it displays the color of the highest stencil value using Max.

@@RVillani Thank you Rodrigo, I sent you an email from the company where I work explaining better my problem.

Thank you! You could multiply the final effect mask by an additional sphere mask. Then you can set the center location and radius via parameters (perhaps from Material Parameter Collection), while passing WorldPosition as one of the inputs, which represents the location in the world of the pixel you're currently computing for.

@@RVillani Thanks again, worked really well!!!

Hmmmm interesting. Like, if it was a weapon you'd see black outlines? I don't think so, because the object is hidden so if you tried to sample its color, you'd get the color from what's in front of it. You'd have to fake it with a texture for each Actor, but that would look a bit weird as the texture would likely move with the screen, not the object. Do you have an example of something doing that? Maybe there's a better way I'm not thinking of because I'm picturing it wrong

@@RVillani hey thank you for your answer. I'm trying to build a portal. I need : - the gun to be able to go inside the wall without being covered by the wall texture - and I was also thinking to use stencil for recursive portal (the dev of portal explained he did it with stencil). I'm burning my brain 😅

​@@christopheaurelie6943 I don't suppose he was talking abou the same type of stencil we see in UE. I found interesting solutions to that clipping problem here: forums.unrealengine.com/t/visible-through-walls/44042/11 My favorite is the vertex offset one: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gZebhKqqp9fHo3k.html The shadows problem at the end you could try to solve by not doing the vertex offset only in the shadow pass, like I show here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/g8d0m8uq16zGooE.html (at 1:42:45)

@@RVillani thank you very much for your answer ! 👍👍👍

Valeu, cara! Eu fiz uma técnica um pouco mais avançada neste aqui: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n8mBjKmgncyxook.html E está em português :D

Ok, vou dar uma olhada, vlw :D

I managed to fix it by changing the following project option: Project Settings> Engine> Rendering> Postprocessing> Activate the option: "Custom Depth with TemporalAA Jitter"

@@__foo__ by activating it? Not deactivating? Usually that settings is what causes people problems XD

@@RVillani activating

The Lerp that mixes the effect with the scene: multiply the value that goes into the Lerp alpha by how much you want the colors to affect the scene.

@@RVillani can you post a pic of the graph? I'm trying to use your material as a highlight material in game and need it to be visible behind walls as well as not behind walls.

@@RVillani the reason I need one of the colors to have an opacity of zero is because I'm finding that the postprocess on the character helps occulude the highlight of objects behind them. If you have a better solution where I can have the highlight not show thru or over my character that would be best. Can you do a tutorial specifically on creating a highlight material that works in this way? It'd be a lifesaver for noobs.

yeah. Project Settings > Rendering > Postprocessing > disable Custom Depth with Temporal AA Jitter

I did something similar once. It wasn't perfect, but enough to fool the viewer on some situations. On a transparent material, set opacity to 100% and set it to Default Lit mode. Then, for its Emissive channel use the SceneColor node. Let me know if it's at least close to what you want.

@@RVillani ok, i have two nodes on translucency material, 1. scene color to emissive, and 2. opacity parameter 0, there is no shadow, its just clear translucence material. What happened now, is that shadow is pure transparent, like a hole. Opposite of what we are looking for.

@@Went2PlayLLC But I said "set opacity to 100%", so it should be 1. Then, if the material uses default lit mode, it should get some shadows, display what's behind it (because of Scene Color) and be fully visible. The shadows might be weak though, because of the emissive. But using emissive is the closest you have to making it's brightness match what's behind it. Also, it might cast shadows, but you can turn that off in the actor. And, something I never managed to solve: it'll have motion blur. So if you move your matte object, you'll see what's behind it with motion blur.

Vlw! 1. Vc chegou a assistir o vídeo? Tem literalmente um capítulo sobre isso no video. 2. Acho que sim, mas não é fácil. Vc vai precisar usar o mesmo esquema de detecção de linhas pra detectar diferenças no canal de stencil. Essas diferenças são as bordas entre os objetos.

@@RVillani Putz, que vacilo o meu. Eu acompanhei o vídeo e reproduzi tudo aqui no meu projeto só até antes do capítulo onde vc exclui as partes visíveis. Ou seja, 1 capítulo antes de vc configurar a grossura das linhas. Foi mal. Agora quanto as bordas, infelizmente usar Stencils pra uso Não é viável aqui no meu projeto. Eu já uso os stencils para outro efeito de PostProcess e vários objetos usam o msm Stencil. Segundo que eu tenho centenas de objetos na cena, vários colados um no outro. Usar 1 Stencil diferente pra cada um seria impraticável. Mas mesmo, obrigado pela ajuda! Seu vídeo ajudou demais e explicou muito bem. Seu inglês também é excelente.

Putz kkkk Pior que acho que só com os stencils mesmo. Obrigado! Agora melhorou um pouco, mas obrigado!