Very early stages of a 2.5d ‘pixel graphic’ engine. The sprites are outlined with random colours for testing, I don’t plan on using this as a “highlighter”, but rather for subtle toon outlines. The character models and textures are randomised for testing.
Interesting bits and possible contributions that have arisen so far during dev:
Faster Gaussian Blur :: I have been testing a faster method for generating Gaussian Blur over my last several projects, and it appears to be working flawlessly. Each pass (vertical and horizontal) uses 5 samples rather than the standard 9, leveraging bilinear filtering on the GPU to get the same results.
Outliner Material :: A simple material that adds an outline to a spatial. This allows for a different outline colour and thickness per object, and multiple or even animated outline colours (which the Cartoon Edge Filter can’t do ?). It uses whatever material is currently set on the object and appends an outline.
Pixel Enhancer :: A very simple little shader to highlight the game pixels (which are currently 4x4 screen pixels).
Screen Aligned Graphics :: nothing too fancy here, the sprites are snapped to screen pixels, in 3d space, kinda neat.