Highlighting System [Released]

Hi
thanks for the reply. Is there a way to do this in version 2? This is the version I have.

 

DieHappyGames,
I'll do my best.

GizmoBradwell,
Thanks! In case you're talking about Mesh.CombineMeshes - you shouldn't get too carried away by this.
Large meshes can degrade performance in some cases because even if small part of such mesh is visible - the whole mesh will be rendered.
By the way, drawcall batching is supported by the Highlighting System.

Christop,
What prevents you from upgrading to the latest version?

 

Hello, good morning.

My name is Remedio and I recently bought from the Unity Asset Store your package for the Highlight System.

First of all, I want to say that its very nice and very good looking system!

But I'm having one issue when deployed to a mobile plataform. When I build for my android phone for tests, the highlight just blur out the entire shape of the object, instead of the "edges" as seen in the editor. I'm sending some pictures attached to help demonstrate what I mean. Look for the difference in the images Unity Editor and Unity Android. I have also took some screenshots of some configs that might be pertinent (I was sure to check the boxes you said in your documentation for mobile).

Do you have any insights of why this might be happening?

Thanks in advance,

Remedio


PS: The object is a Skinned Mesh Renderer and I have tried with a very high iteration value (of 20, in the camera Highlighting Mobile component) to check it.
- Anti-Aliasing is completly off (on all quality settings).

Android:


Editor:

 

I seem to get the screen darkening effect with linear color space in 3.0.1. I'm using Unity 4.5.5f1 and I've only used Highlighting System with Oculus Rift SDK 0.4.3. Don't know if it happens with just a regular camera.

 

Hi,

We'd like to use the Highlighting system for drawing outlines of characters (i.e. black highlights) into rendertextures. However, we are having no luck with doing this. We've had no problems highlighting characters drawn using full screen (i.e. framebuffer camera.)

Here's the flow that we'd like to have (as described compared to your "simple" test scene.)

1. Main Camera does NOT include a highlighting camera.
2. Main Camera should not render the highlighted object.
3. A separate camera, rendering to a square rendertexture renders the object and camera, from the correct orientation (which is different to main camera)
4. The highlighting is applied to the separate camera rendertexture
5. The results of highlighting on separate camera rendertexture are used as the source texture for a quad in the scene, drawn later with Main Camera.

We've had a couple of cracks at getting such as setup going, and haven't managed it (we're getting various issues, like aspect-incorrect rendering because framebuffer and rendertexture aare different sizes.) Do you know if it would be possible to make this case work (essentially so we can impostor highlight outlines into our scene?)

 

We also see a *lot* of cases where the highlighting system isn't working correctly, but selecting its gameobject in the inspector results in the system refreshing and thereafter it works. I expect this is because it gets refreshed by the editor script. A simple test case is to disable a highlighitngrenderer/blitter from code, then re-enable them. Your highlights will still be gone until you view the inspector for the camera they were added to.

 

At the moment, available version at asset store, doesn`t work well in linear color space.

 

Remedio.tv,
Hello Remedio,

Thanks!

Please make sure that 'Use 24-bit Depth Buffer' is also enabled in Player Settings for your target platform.
Stencil is not there when only 16-bit depth buffer is available.

In case it is enabled but the highlighting still doesn't work properly - this can indicate that the stencil buffer is not supported on this device, and you can possibly resolve this by using an older version of the Highlighting System which uses black & white texture to replace stencil buffer functionality.

ferretnt,
5 minutes, one small custom script to manage RenderTexture rendering and one little modification to the highlighting system to explicitly pass active camera to the HighlightingBase.RenderHighlighting method.
Result:

Email me your invoice number - I'll send you this example project.

As for your second question - I don't know what you exactly mean under 'correctness' in this case,
but no one ever reported about any issues with this, and enabling/disabling highlighting with the script below works properly:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3. using HighlightingSystem;
4.  
5. public class Controller : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     public HighlightingRenderer hr;
8.     public HighlightingBlitter hb;
9.     public bool e;
10.  
11.     private bool _e;
12.  
13.     //
14.     void Awake()
15.     {
16.         e = _e = hr.enabled;
17.     }
18.  
19.     //
20.     void Update()
21.     {
22.         if (_e == e) { return; }
23.         _e = e;
24.         hr.enabled = _e;
25.         hb.enabled = _e;
26.     }
27. }

Zhal and PixelaLabsLLC,
Thanks for reporting this issue!
Removing [ImageEffectOpaque] attribute from OnRenderImage method in HighlightingRenderer script helps in some cases.
I'll discover this issue further and get back to you with the complete solution.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I was already using 24 and 32 bit buffer. But it still doesn't work.

I'm currently testing on a Galaxy S4 with Android 4.4.2 (it should have the Stencil Buffer).

But either way, where can I get the previous version to try out the black and white texture instead?

Thanks in advance,

Remedio.

 

Remedio.tv,

You can precisely check this by logging the value returned by SystemInfo.supportsStencil when running on your device. (Though, I'm not sure of why it returns int instead of a bool as many other SystemInfo properties, but for me, when stencil is supported - supportsStencil returns 1.)

You can also check that this is not my fault by trying to run this example on your device.
In case it will also not work properly - you should report about this bug to Unity Technologies with all your details containing device model, Android version, etc.

You can email me your invoice number - I'll send you an older version of the Highlighting System.

 

Hello again.

Something weird is happening. My device shows 1 as result of supportsStencil, and the demo works fine (although extremely slow - when you rotate the cube only 1 thing inside is shown each side of the cube).

Could you please send me the other version to try it out? I sent you an email on 10.25.2014 with my invoice (might have been on your spam folder, I don't know).

Thanks again.

 

Remedio.tv,

Oh, now I see your emails. They were in my spam folder for some reason as you've said. Sorry about that!

This is really important and informative! Let's continue our discussion by email. I think we'll be able to find out what's causing this issue on your device.

 

Sorry for the delay in acknowledging your response. After emailing you, I got a rendertexture-based scene working, and then gradually migrated that to our real test case (and forgot to check the forums.) In the spirit of acknowledging good support, thanks for the example project. I'll email you offline for it and compare to my version, but I do seem to have everything working correctly, at least on iOS.

 

Hi, I have discovered the same problem as described by Remedio.tv above but on Desktop.
Is it solved?

 

After I downgraded to version 2 it works perfectly! Awesome system!

 

Zhal,
Seems like I've finally found the source of issues with linear lighting.
To fix them - in HighlightingBase.cs script find this line:

Code (CSharp):

1. Graphics.SetRenderTarget(dst);

And replace it with:

Code (CSharp):

1. RenderTexture.active = dst;

Removing [ImageEffectOpaque] attribute isn't required (without this attribute Highlighting System may not work properly with some other post-processing effects, such as SSAO).

Fabian Schempp,
Hi! Please send me your example project - I can't reproduce this issue on my PC with my demo scenes.

 

Edit:
Our issues in linear space are fixed with that script edit.

 

@slice3d

Hi! I'm using the 2.0 version of your system and I got some odd behaviour when running on OSX Yosemite (it's perfect on Windows and OSX Mavericks, good job )

We got a dressing panel on our game, which enable players to remove and put cloth on their character.
To do this, we simply extend this panel camera width viewport rect while moving the x and width viewport parts of the main camera to the left.

On Windows, it looks like this :


As you can see, we got some interactable items highlighted here.

This is what it looks like on OS X Yosemite :


The "black part" is appearing and growing in the exact same speed as the dressing camera (left).
I found that when disabling your plugin, the issue won't happen.

Did you, by any chance, already encountered something similar?

EDIT : This is happening after I solved another issue detailed here. To fix this, I was forced to set all camera's rendering path to Forward..

EDIT 2 : It seems this bug is only happening on a WebPlayer build.

EDIT 3 (I just love edits) : When I set the main camera's rendering path back to Deffered Lighting, the bug doesn't happen.

EDIT 4 : I tried to open the panel without resizing the main camera's rect viewport with all rendering path set to Forward and it was normal. So, to recapitulate : The bug is happening with Camera.main.renderingPath set to Forward && when moving/resizing its rect viewport.

 

@Random_Peon

Hmm... That's a very specific issue.
I haven't encountered something like this before, and according to your message - this is a problem with the Unity engine.

Not sure if it helps, but you can try to uncomment this line from the HighlightingEffect.cs script:

Code (CSharp):

1. //shaderCamera.projectionMatrix = refCam.projectionMatrix;        // Uncomment this line if you have problems using Highlighting System with custom projection matrix on your camera

Please note that the Highlighting System v2.x is no longer supported so I strongly recommend you to upgrade.

 

@slice3d

I tried upgrading and it didn't solve my problem.
We decided to no longer resize nor move the camera's viewport rect.

One of my teammates decided to look into it a bit deeper and found that one particular method was causing the issue : Graphics.Blit.

To be precise, it was this part :

Code (CSharp):

1. // Compose final frame with highlighting
2.     void OnRenderImage(RenderTexture source, RenderTexture destination)
3.     {
4.         // If stencilBuffer is not created by some reason
5.         if (stencilBuffer == null)
6.         {
7.             // Simply transfer framebuffer to destination
8.             Graphics.Blit(source, destination);
9.             return;
10.         }

And later in the same method :

Code (CSharp):

1. // Compose
2.         compMaterial.SetTexture("_StencilTex", stencilBuffer);
3.         compMaterial.SetTexture("_BlurTex", oddEven ? buffer : buffer2);
4.         Graphics.Blit(source, destination, compMaterial);
5.        
6.         // Cleanup
7.         RenderTexture.ReleaseTemporary(buffer);
8.         RenderTexture.ReleaseTemporary(buffer2);
9.         if (stencilBuffer != null)
10.         {
11.             RenderTexture.ReleaseTemporary(stencilBuffer);
12.             stencilBuffer = null;
13.         }

 

Hi @slice3d

Concerning the issue, to complete what @Random_Peon said, it's only when the RenderTexture source intervene that the issue appears.
You are doing multiples Graphics.Blit and they fit perfectly to the camera.rect, I mean, if I output your buffer or buffer2 there's no problem (except the black background but this is a normal behaviour ).

But every time I use Graphics.Blit(source, destination); even alone, it fails when the camera.rect is modified.

 

Hello, just want to know how to do opposite function of SeeThrough, only mesh behind the wall will grow, but other area stay normal. Can I do it with small code change?

 

@slice3d
Hello
I need your help
why I could't see higt light when I bakinged my scene ?

 

@Random_Peon @MaT.
It happens only on Mac OS X Yosemite or even on a PC?
Graphics.Blit is a core Unity feature, so in the first case - only Unity Technologies can fix this issue.
In the second case I will be able to fix this once I'll have an example project to reproduce this issue. Could you please provide me with one?

@Rosa Gao
This is what you're looking for?

@dxtdxt
Not sure what 'bakinged' means, but in case you meant lightmapping issues - just upgrade to the latest version or use this fix if you're still on the v2.x

 

Hi Slice3d,
I bought your asset recently, and it works really well!

I had a slight problem however - which may be to do with another asset I'm using called the Realistic FPS Package.

For the main player it uses 2 cameras: one for normal view, and another for the special effects at a higher depth.

When I apply the Highlighter renderer to the Weapon Camera, the highlights are always displaced incorrectly:


When I put the Renderer on the Main Camera, even with blitters placed on the weapon camera referencing the main camera, the highlights no longer show.

Any hints/tips as to how I could possibly get this to work?

 

You had a bug fix a couple months ago on this thread. Are you going to release an update so we don't need to change our code? I'm buying this plugin today by the way.

 

There is a problem when starting the scene with the effect disabled and with AA enabled ( "HighlightingSystem : Framebuffer depth data is not available and can't be used to occlude highlighting. Highlighting occluders enabled." )
When enabling the effect trough script it doesn't start the effect, if I manually select the camera object that has the effect the effect starts.

 

Hey Guys, does anyone else have conflicts with other assets? For example I noticed that with the Highlighting render on, my V-Lights (volumetric lights) asset can't be used at the same time. There are also various other shaders that don't seem to work with this Highlighting system. Any tips as to how I could get around this?

 

@Eyehawk
The problem is definitely with the other assets you use (or with their combination) - I'm pretty sure they don't care about the Unity rendering pipeline as much as Highlighting System does.
I made everything to make it work out of the box in as many common cases as possible and to not conflict with other image effects if at all possible.
Send me your example project - I'll try to help you to setup Highlighting System.
Or you can check out TwoCameras and ThreeCameras examples from the HighlightingSystemDemo/Scenes folder to see how it should be setup for two and three cameras correspondingly.

btw, in several cases using additional cameras in Unity gives significant performance overhead, so it's better to avoid this if possible

@jerotas
Sure, I'll add all known fixes to the update.
For the moment, if you're using the latest 3.0.1 version - you should only change one line in your copy of the Highlighting System to make it work properly with linear lighting.

@Boji
Unity doesn't provide access to the native depth buffer when antialiasing is enabled.
This message is harmless, but it means that the highlighting will not be occluded with scene z-buffer and you should use highlighting occluders instead to occlude highlighters. Though I recommend you to use AntiAliasingAsPostEffect instead of hardware antialiasing.

If you need to control enabled state of the Highlighting System from scripts - make sure to enable/disable both HighlightingRenderer and HighlightingBlitter components like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3. using HighlightingSystem;
4.  
5. public class Test : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     bool e = false;
8.  
9.     HighlightingRenderer hr;
10.     HighlightingBlitter hb;
11.  
12.     //
13.     void Start()
14.     {
15.         Camera cam = Camera.main;
16.         hr = cam.GetComponent<HighlightingRenderer>();
17.         hb = cam.GetComponent<HighlightingBlitter>();
18.  
19.         InvokeRepeating("Toggle", 0f, 1f);
20.     }
21.  
22.     //
23.     void Toggle()
24.     {
25.         e = !e;
26.         hr.enabled = hb.enabled = e;
27.     }
28. }

 

Hi is it possible to do something like in my pictures? Only a borderline where the parts that are occluded are hidden.

 

Thanks @slice3d, using your tips, one of our other guys changed the rendering order of some of the other effects and they all work in harmony now

 

I'm using 3.01 on mobile, some works but some returns a black screen and lags it considerably. What are the requirements for the mobile for this to work reliably?

 

please help. how to do this?

 

Hi,
did it apply highlighting system at rotating camera?(move, rotate - Free camera)
And if i buy it.
Can i make mouse hover effect, and selected effect?
"Obj" files import at runtime, in my place.
can i apply highlighting system?
thank you.

 

I contacted you via your website but adding a note here. Is it possible to get the v2.0? Got this specifically for 2D but it appears this does not work with the latest version. So was curious if I can get the previous version which allowed this? Thanks.

 

@TRuoss
I think it is possible, but you will need to modify the Highlighting System rendering routine.
You should render occluders to the highlighting buffer after the blurring pass ended.

@Eyehawk
Great!

@imtrobin
It is hard to say, since the issues here may vary significantly between different mobile devices.
For the Highlighting System I'm not using anything but the Unity API, so it means that Unity Engine is not fully supported on your mobile devices.
Could you please name them so I'll try to take a look by myself if I'll have a chance to get my hands on these devices some day?

@GantZ_Yaka
Answered to you by email.
In short - unfortunately this is not possible, but I'll keep trying to find the way to implement that.

@SuHwanK
Sorry, but I think I don't understand all your questions clearly.
Anyways - you can try out the Highlighting System here to see for yourself how it's working.
WSAD - move camera, right mouse button drag - rotate camera (like in the Unity Editor scene view)

@archetype
Answered to you by email.

 

I just bought this and had it integrated in just a few minutes, so kudos there. However, my game is third person, and if I highlight a door, for example, that is my target for interaction, I can either:

1) With see through on, see the outline through my third person avatar, which looks wrong and jarring.
2) With see through off, the door outline is occluded by my avatar (good), but the part of my avatar that occludes the door is highlighted (this looks bad).

Is there any way to make #2 not include the avatar in the highlight and just highlight the non-occluded sections of the door?

Thanks!
Kirk

 

I am working on Oculus Rift. This is not working when I am try to achieve the highlighting effect.

I attached Highlighting Renderer script and Highlighter Bitting script to the two cameras of Oculus Rift. But only one eye is rendering the effect. I see its getting called only once by the system. Can you please help me how to achieve on both the cameras?

 

Hey Slice3d. We've been using your tool for quite some time, and have been totally happy with it.
We recently switched to Unity 5 and upgraded your tool to the latest version as well. Since then we're seeing an odd issue that when we have something highlighted, it seems that Soft Particles are brokes.

We use a lot of fog, and now it seems like all the fog becomes stronger and we see the lines where it collides with everything.

Do you have any idea what might be causing that? or how to fix it? It happens even I put everything at 0 so there actually isn't a "highlight". As soon as we call ConstantOn (Color color) we get the problem.

Thank you

 

@DirtyHippy
You should render your character after highlighting blit.
Easiest way to achieve that - is to render your character model with the second camera which has higher depth.
Open TwoCameras demo scene, remove HighlightingBlitter component from Camera 2 and add it to Camera 1.

I've just noticed that this doesn't work with Unity 5.0.0f3 for some reason. Will fix this.

@harish.g9
I've seen that several customers successfully using Highlighting System with OVR but I've never tried this by myself. Will try out and post some instructions here.

@Katarak
Unity 5 related fixes is on it's way, send me your simple example project to reproduce this issue, so I'll be able to fix this one too.

 

@harish.g9

Works fine for me with the latest OVR Unity SDK 0.4.4 beta.

Instructions:
1. Download and unpack OVR SDK.
2. Create new project. Import HighlightingSystem and OculusUnityIntegration packages.
3. Open OVR/Scenes/Cubes scene.
4. Add HighlightingRenderer and HighlightingBlitter on both LeftEyeAnchor and RightEyeAnchor cameras.
5. Add SpectrumController to some cubes.

Don't forget to always keep the same settings for both HighlightingRenderer components.
This can be helpful:

 

thought tricks were needed , better like this, congrats, gonna buy package D

 

Won't this will only work for the character? Any other geometry that occludes the door will still be highlighted.

 

Hello, I have a problem seeing the lighting in my tablet tegra note but I can usually see it on my phone sony z2. You know what is the problem?

 

Hi,

This looks like a very usefull extension. I two questions:
- Does the highlighting work with orthographic cameras?
- What configration do I have over the outlines - besides fiddling in the sources - since I would like to have more hard/unblurred outlines.

Cheers!

 

Hi, I've upgraded to Unity 5 - Personal Edition - from Unity 4 Pro, and it looks like ClothRenderer no-longer exists, so the HighlightableObject.cs gives a compilation error on the following line:

ClothRenderer[] cr = GetComponentsInChildren<ClothRenderer>();

I tried hitting 'download' in the asset store for the latest version but it gives a generic error: "Highlighting System failed to download."

I'll try this evening from home, maybe it's a proxy issue here.

 

Update: still not able to download newest version - "Highlighting System failed to download." even after removing all traces of highlightable object from my code. Other plugins (e.g. TextMeshPro download fine).

Edit: Downgraded back to Unity 4.6, then updated to latest version of Highlighting System, and THEN upgraded to Unity 5. Seems to be working fine now, once I comment out the ClothRenderer stuff in HighlightableObject.cs, and add back in 'SpriteRenderer' caching

 

I'm using the Highlighting System with Unity 5, but right now it does not work with Depth of Field. In line 460 of HighlithingBase.cs it says "shaderCamera.depthTextureMode = DepthTextureMode.None;", but the problem persits: The whole image is blurred during active highlighting.

Is there a fix for this problem? In this state, I do not see how I could use this plugin. I already tried to change the position of the components (both Renderer and Blitter).

 

@DirtyHippy
Sorry, but there is no other way to make it work/look like that. It is fundamentally impossible (and not only in Unity).

@s4wolf64
Replied to your email.

@jorrit5477
1. It does work with orthographic cameras
2. Available effect settings:

In case you're looking for something like that:


It is not available out of the box, but I'll post here later some step-by-step instructions on how to modify your highlighting system to make it work like that.

@Torninator @Slowin
Highlighting System is not yet updated for Unity 5 - I'm working on that.

 

Hello,
I've been heavily considering purchasing this asset, but before I do, I need to know how this package would work on Unity 4.6 GUI elements, Image components specifically.

Would it glow around the square frame of the image, or would it glow around the actual visible part?
Thanks!