Real Outline — Outlines, Highlight, Selection & Edge Detection for Unity 6
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Per-object outlines and highlights plus full-scene depth, normal, colour and ID edge detection. Built-in, URP and HDRP. Exact pixel width, see-through modes, glow, line art.Real Outline draws the two kinds of line a game needs, from one asset: the highlight around a specific object, and the ink over the whole scene. It runs in Built-in, URP 17.3 and HDRP 17.3 on Unity 6, from one settings surface, and it never touches your materials.PER-OBJECT HIGHLIGHTSPut a Real Outline Target on a prop, a character or a whole assembly and it gets an outline with a named style. Ten styles ship: Selected, Hover, Interactable, Enemy, Ally, Loot, Danger, Objective, Stealth and Ghost. Each carries colour and opacity, occluded colour, an inner wash, width, softness, glow, a rim pattern, what happens behind walls, a pulse and a priority. A Style Set asset overrides them by name, so "Enemy" is defined in one place for the whole project.AN EXACT OUTLINE, NOT A SCALED HULLThe marked renderers are drawn into an object mask, and a separable Euclidean distance transform turns that mask into an exact distance for every pixel. The width is exact in pixels (or in metres, converted per object per frame), corners are round instead of spiky, softness is a sub-pixel falloff, and the glow is a second read of the same number rather than a second kernel. Concave meshes, skinned meshes, LOD groups and grouped objects all outline correctly - no inverted hull, no vertex extrusion, no duplicated geometry.RIM PATTERNS AND MOTIONSolid, dashed, dotted, double-line and hatched rims, parameterised along the edge by the distance field's own gradient, so a dash keeps its pixel length at any distance and marches around corners. Add a pulse, a bright band sweeping up the rim, or a one-shot flash on select - a static rim reads as a debug overlay in motion, a moving one reads as your game's UI.BEHIND WALLSFour see-through modes: Hidden, Show Occluded, Always Visible and Only When Hidden. The visible/occluded split is decided per pixel against the camera depth texture, so it costs one draw per renderer instead of two and stays exact for moving and skinned geometry. The hidden half is washed with its own colour at a configurable opacity, so an enemy behind a pillar reads as a translucent tinted silhouette with a rim, not as a floating loop. A scan pulse can reveal it only as a shell of distance sweeps past - the detective mode, not a permanent overlay.FULL-SCENE EDGE DETECTIONDepth edges (measured as a second difference, so a steeply sloped floor is not one huge line), normal edges from normals reconstructed out of the depth buffer, colour and luminance edges, and object-ID edges between two different highlighted objects. Each source has its own weight and threshold; thickness, softness, distance fade and a sky cut-off are shared. No normal prepass and no extra render target: the same three passes serve both halves.LINE ART AND TOON INKFlatten the render towards a paper colour in a chosen number of tone steps and leave the edges as ink. Sketch walks the lines off the pixel grid like a pencil. Ten scene-wide presets ship: Highlights, SoftGlow, Crisp, SceneEdges, ToonInk, LineArt, Sketch, Blueprint, XRayScan and Mobile - a cel-shaded look over any lit render, without editing a single material.ONE LINE OF SCRIPTRealOutlineManager.Highlight(enemy, "Enemy"); Unhighlight, SetColor, SetWidth, SetSeeThrough, FlashOnce and static Highlighted/Unhighlighted events. Highlight() adds the component if the object has none and reuses it otherwise, so calling it every frame from a hover check is free. RealOutlineRuntime.SetOverride("LineArt") blends any scene-wide look over the Volume from one call, identically in all three pipelines.BUILT FOR UNITY 6URP is Render Graph only - a ScriptableRendererFeature with an unsafe pass for the mask draw and raster passes for the rest, no deprecated compatibility path. HDRP is a custom post process registered by the wizard. Built-in is a command buffer plus an image effect. All three run the same shader body and the same buffers, so a look authored in one pipeline is the same look in the others.COST YOU CAN SEEHalf-resolution mask and distance field (about four times cheaper), a mobile path with one fixed twelve-tap ring and no distance field, and a search radius that follows the widest style on screen, so narrow outlines cost fewer taps automatically. Measured cost is in the technical details.WHAT YOU GETRuntime and editor assemblies with an asmdef each per pipeline, the shared HLSL body with one thin seam per pipeline, a setup wizard that installs everything for the active pipeline, preflight checks, three sample scenes with baked lighting and light probes, three sample scripts that are the whole integration, and a manual.The samples are Showcase (props on different styles, a walking articulated character, hover/select and a runtime look switcher), ThroughWalls (a corridor built around the see-through modes) and Sandbox (world-scaled outlines that shrink with distance).Unity 6000.3.21f1 or newer. Render pipelines: Built-in, URP 17.3, HDRP 17.3 - all three from one package; Custom SRPs are not supported.No compute shaders, no VFX Graph, no particle systems, no third-party dependencies and no bundled textures: the package is code, shaders and three sample scenes.Passes per camera: one draw per highlighted renderer into an RGBA32 object mask, two fullscreen passes for the separable distance field (RGBAHalf), one composite. Scene edges and line art add no extra render target.Up to 16 different highlight styles on screen at once; targets sharing a style share a slot, so a thousand objects on one style cost one slot, and the distance field's search radius follows the widest style on screen.Quality options: half-resolution mask and distance field (about four times cheaper) and a mobile path that replaces the distance field with one fixed twelve-tap ring.Limits: the object mask ignores alpha clipping and draws front faces only; transparent renderers do not write depth, so the visible/occluded split treats them as empty air; XR single-pass renders but is not tuned.Full C# source included. Scripting API: RealOutlineManager, RealOutlineTarget, RealOutlineStyle, RealOutlineStyleSet, RealOutlineSettings, RealOutlinePresets, RealOutlineRuntime.
