UPDATE! UE 5.4.1 and this still WORKS! one thing is different though. on the first step when he changes the "blendable Location" the option he picks is no longer available. i chose "scene color before dof" and it still worked ! all the other options give you shaky lines!!!
@@ShadowBrave21 Thankyou for reporting back, I'm so accustomed to people just finding the answer and disappearing. You deserve a gold medal for community involvement.
After working through the exercise in this video, I went to sleep and dreamed about shaders. When I woke up, I suddenly realized I understood the Material Editor and had arrived at the solution to my own little shader problem in my sleep. The only problem is that when I'm talking myself through what I need to do, my internal monologue is all in a thick French accent now.
I've been programming and developing games in various languages and engines for the better part of 10 years, I don't often comment on tutorials but I'm halfway through and I just have to stop by and say that it's absurd that this is free content, if you're on the fence about watching the video because it's long, don't be. Set aside a couple hours of your day, make a coffee, and watch the whole thing. The instructional quality of this video is leagues above the average tutorial, calling it a "tutorial" honestly feels wrong as it's higher quality than many courses I've paid for. Evans' clearly understands all the technical aspects of the concepts he's demonstrating and develops them in a scalable and modular way that's appropriate for an industry-level implementation. This isn't some quick hack to achieve a passable result published by an overworked indie dev, this is how a feature like this would be implemented in a AAA title. To top it off, Evans' is an exceptionally skilled instructor, he doesn't just show you how to "make it work". Over this hour and a half he skillfully weaves explanations, demonstrations, models, and diagrams into his setup so that you actually understand how everything is working and why he chose to do it this way. After watching this video once, I'm confident I could scale and debug this shader with ease regardless of the project. If i watched it again, I'm confident I could build it from scratch without referencing the video again. Amazing video, great content. Make the time to watch it.
Since you helped me, I'll help you as well. If you hold these buttons in a shader graph when clicking, it'll create the following useful nodes for you (I see you know some of them, but comment readers may not so just listing them all): S= Scalar Parameter. 1= Scalar Constant 2= Vector 2 Constant 3= Vector 3 Constant V= Vector 4 Parameter F= Material Function Call (defaults to last used but also calls last edited if the graph was open this session) L= Lerp (linear interpolate) I= If M= Multiply A= Add D= Divide E= Power (exponent) B= Bump Offset R= Reflection Vector T= Texture Sample U= Texture Coordinate (think "UV" to remember it easily.) N= Normalize Lastly, to make the center line of the graph easy to see, go to: Edit > Editor Preferences > (GENERAL TAB) > Appearance > "Graphs" Subsection > Grid Center Color. Can also just search "color" within editor preferences. I set mine to green, easier to navigate around larger graphs this way by knowing, at all times, exactly where my center axis is. Also helps me when opening old graphs I don't have recently memorized: Quickly identify where the graphs "starts."
Hey thanks a lot Gunny for the tips! I didn't know about the grid center color! I think your comment will be extremely helpful to the other members of the community 😁
I watched your video on toon shading, and I was blown away by how well you explain the concepts you are teaching. I really wish you had more tutorials out there.
Thank you so much Vig for this awesome feedback 🙏💙 It took me a huge amount of time to create this tutorial (2 months), and reading these kind of feedbacks is extremely rewarding 😊 I hope that I'll have a huge audience someday 😁
Wow thank you so much Robert for the encouragement 🙏😊 It's extremely rewarding to know that people like my videos and find them useful! It's the only thing I want to do : help people with my knowledge of the engine 😁 Thanks again and have a great one!
I normally don't comment on videos. But his man is amazing. Very good explanation, shows EVERYTHING, lets us play with the customization. What a nice guy. I'm glad I found your channel so early one! You will be huge in a matter of days.
Really fantastic tutorial. Since I don't see any other comments about this, I wanted to mention that this post process effect really highlights a problem with Temporal AA (which, at least for me, is UE5's default AA method). On higher settings the artifacts might not be so bad, but on low settings (which I use to ensure my editor is performing well) they are quite awful. Temporal AA uses past frames to modify the final scene texture, and so when you create strict boundaries representing "lines" cosmetically, these can be shredded and smeared by the anti-aliasing effect when a camera is moving/turning or a scene changes rapidly. It's not a problem with the post process method itself (unless there is a way to fix this with pipeline flags similar to the one specified @4:00), but it did make the outlines look terrible on my system until I switched to a different anti aliasing method (Project settings > Rendering > Default Settings > Anti-Aliasing Method). I hate Temporal AA anyway, so I'd recommend everyone use this as one more reason to switch to a nicer AA method.
You're an absolute genius. I'm a complete noob with Unreal Engine, and even though I didn't fully follow the math behind all the calculations (haven't really had to do math since high school 15 years ago), I could follow your video with easy. Your explanations are detailed, clear, and most importantly you didn't start skipping the basic stuff (i.e. ctrl + space to open the content drawer, ctrl + D to duplicate) that isn't muscle memory to me yet. Definitely earned a sub!
Thanks a lot Dissuxx for this wonderful feedback 🙏💙 It's always a pleasure to know that viewers appreciate my way of teaching 😊 Thanks also for the sub! I hope my future tutorials will also be helpful to you 😁
I have been working on my game since 2017 in UE4, moving it to UE5 finally... I must say, you've taught me more about materials than I've learned in the past 10 years. Very thorough, to the point, and I understand what we've accomplished when I'm done. Thank you! Can't wait to replace my old post processing effect with this one! 5 stars!
Wow thanks a lot Sam for your awesome feedback 🙏😊 It's awesome to know that I can help people that already have a good knowledge of the engine! Thanks again and I'm glad that I could help 😁
Amazing tutorial! Amazing outline shader! Followed on 5.3 and everything worked fine (for some reason I had to turn off context sensitive search to see the "Get Component By Class" and "Set Render Custom Depth"), but apart from that everything went 1 to 1 like you showed. I really like that you explain the reason why something needs to be done or what is the root of the problem so we learn to look out for those in the future. Thank you for making stuff like this!
Thank you so much for this. This is the first in-depth tutorial I've been able to follow along with completely. Very few people making these tutorial videos take the time to explain everything down to the granular details. It's been a great help; I've commented almost every node and several node groups, so for the first time, I feel like I can come back later and still understand what's going on. Please make more videos!
That's been my experience. People go through the node creation too quickly, and don't explain WHY things work and I feel like I am painting by numbers and copying someone else, but with this one I felt like I was actually learning how the post processing actually works and why it does what it does. High Quality stuff.
I graduated from Gnomon and I would rate this above many of the instructors I had while I was there. I usually hate giving compliments while knocking down someone else, but in this case I think it is a fair way to demonstrate the quality of the tutorial you have made. Thank you so much for your time and insight!
literally 7 minutes into this video and im subscribing to this guy, lovely voice, clear instructions, bit of a long tutorial but im going to muddle through
Woah... Just wow.. This is by far the most impressive tutorial i've ever seen for anything ever. Every single step is explained clearly along with why you're doing it. Not to mention the actual method used here is much more impressive than any of the others i've found, the amount of customization involved here blows all others out of the water. This is amazing. Bravo.
Thank you so much for this tutorial! One of the best tutorials no joke. Im studying game art for 6 years now and have never seen a person go this in depth, thank you❤ subscribed
Thank you so much for the sub and for your feedback on my work! It's awesome to know that viewers appreciate the amount of work I put into each of my video 😊
Hands down the best in depth tutorial I seen so far regarding outlines. Tackled all the bugs and made it easily understandable. Looking forward to learn more from your other tutorials. Great job! Thank you so much
Fantastic work. Thank you for it truly. There were so many times I'd do something and say, "Oh I hope we cover this edge case." And immediately or 1 section or so later you fixed the issue in a clear and concise manner.
Hey Joe! I'm glad you've enjoyed it! It's kind of hard to understand all the aspect of outline shading, so I tried to explain it as precisely as I can to help as much people as possible. Thank you 😊
I cannot describe how amazing these videos are, and the effort you put into explaining and making things understandbable When you pulled up the Presentation for the depth Modulation I just started laughing at how insanely cool it is that you even made a presentation for this video to explain this process. These videos are amazing, Im so grateful for your work, once I have more money ill do my best to support your channel .
Been trying to get something like this working for a while, and your presentation is by the far most comprehension and clearly explained! Really appreciate how you go over each component and how it works. Thanks!
Hi Loot! Thanks a lot for your feedback! It's rewarding to know that I helped you solve your problems! Thanks for taking the time to leave this kind message 🙏😊
Holy cow. You sir are amazing. I learnt so much. Reading about it, the theory, the math are nice and all but you brought it together in such a way that you can go from knowing to understanding.
Thanks, very useful! I was able to have the outline show through other objects by changing the edge depth detection to custom depth instead of scene depth and disabling the custom depth masking.
I'm only partway through the video, but at the part where you create the edge detection shader for normals, instead of using distance (which has square roots), it's faster and more accurate to use dot product. A dot product is the correct way to compare normals. It will give you 1 for normals that are equal. And -1 for normals that face away. So you can use "one minus" node on each before adding them or just do 4 - total after you've added them all up. You will get more accurate results.
Something else to be aware is that if you use the stencil buffer, that actor will ALWAYS be drawn no matter what. It will never get culled. And the order in which they get drawn in the stencil buffer is completely random. This means that if you have two actors overlapping, the outline color from the actor that is further away can bleed through on the outline of the actor in front.
@@alienrenders Won't the second bug you've pointed out be fixed by what he's done at 1:01:43 ? Outline is drawn only if SceneDepth is equal to CustomDepth, so if something else is placed between the camera and custom depth object it's not supposed to bleed through.
@@kamilbeben9900 The second bug is explicitly when both objects have outlines. You can no longer guarantee what order the stencil buffer is written. The custom depth buffer cannot help here.
@@alienrenders I see. I had no luck reproducing this and haven't found anything in the docs, but that doesn't really mean anything as unreal documentation can be extremely lacking at times. Are you speaking from experience, or have you read about stencil buffer behavior somewhere? If the latter, could you please point me where to look at? I'd like to have a better understanding of what I'm working with.
This is quite possibly the best tutorial I have ever seen. Thank you! Its so rare that someone creates so thorough a tutorial, coviering not just how to do something, but how to do it WELL. One thing I noticed when following through on my own project is that the normal edge detection doesnt seem to work with unlit materials. They do not seem to output any world normals to use. I fixed it by using lit (I have disabled all lighting to get a flat toon look). Perhaps this is commonly known but maybt it helps someone out.
Hi Ollie! Thank you so much for this awesome feedback! 🙏😊 It's extremely rewarding to know that people appreciate the hard work I put into each of my tutorials! Also, thanks for the info about unlit materials. I think it will be useful to other viewers of this tutorial 😁
I found a fix for my issue, which was where I had two materials in the post process materials array, and the outline was after the cellshading... if I just move the cellshading to be after the outline then it works perfectly :)
This guy is teaching you how to make this for free...but he sells it for $15! What a fuckin' legend. He didn't have to do this, he could just make a showcase video and sell his product, but he's willing to teach. He's awesome.
Great tut. Evans, this is incredibly thorough and easy to understand, follow and digest! Def one of the best Unreal Blueprint programmers I have seen so far. Kudos brother.
This is the tutorial I needed. I was moved by the way you solve problems one by one. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. And at 41:07 'f(depth max) = thickness min' seems to be correct. :)
Hi Lotuspond! Thanks a lot for your feedback 😊 Even if it was the hardest video I've done since I begun, I had a lot of fun too walking through each and every problem of the shader. I'm glad you appreciated it 😁 And thanks for pointing out the error! I think I was too tired and didn't realize it was wrong haha
Your content helped me a lot, you explain it so well and that makes the tutorial very unique, you prepare slider to explain the theory behind the stuff you show in the node structure, Absolutely fantastic! keep going!
Thank you Arthur 😊 It's heart warming to know that members of our great community appreciate the amount of work I put into each of my tutorials 🙏 Thank you!
Just wanted to thank you very much for such an excellent function and to say how nice it was to have a clear, step by step guide for how it both works and how to set everything up! I recently implemented this for a UEFN project and while its not perfect, as it is visible through particle effects and transparent materials, there's enough covered here for me to eventually understand how to adapt it further.
Thank you Kryss for your feedback! It's awesome to know that this shader works with UEFN! As for transparent materials and particle effects, maybe you can have a look at what Christopher Sims does on twitter. If I remember well, he shared a material for creating outlines on translucent materials :)
@@evansbohl The particle effects are native to Fortnite so I have very little control ove them. Ideally I'd want the lines drawn behind the transparencies but I'm guessing that means a completely different method like the material based approach you mention. For my first UEFN project I wanted to keep things simple by just using native Fortnite assets but I'll certainly be building upon your shader for a stylised look in forthcoming projects so thanks again for such a good foundation!
This is the best tutorial out there for an outline shader. You did a really good job explaining each node. Made it easy to replicate the shader in a different engine.
absolutely amazing tutorial you actually explain everything that is being done and why it is being done, very helpful for someone actually wanting to learn rather than copy paste, thank you for taking your time to make such a good video :D
Hey Jojo! Thanks a lot for this awesome feedback! I'm the kind of person who likes to understand everything he does, that's why I like to explain each and every step I take for my tutorials :) I'm glad to know you like my teaching style :D
I saw such material as an article and it was too hard to understand. Thank you for the video! I could finally understand it without having my brain explode immediately hah
i love how i have any idea about what are you talking about, but it works and gets the job done hahaha it's not your fault, this subject is really complex and makes me wonder how can someone really study all these nodes and create great thing with it. Because literally, i just follow your steps to get the result, but these formulas are really impressive!! Good job, anyway
Absolutely amazing tutorial. Had exactly everything I was looking for, clean and perfectly explained. Also, the way you say buffer gives makes me happy.
Absolutely amazing, a similar one is used in games like Tower of Fantasy and Genshin impact. This tutorial was amazing and I plan on implementing it into my own game.
This is just amazing! Thank you so much. ... I'm not a coder, but I can usually follow along, and this was just stunning! Watching you put together this logic is like visiting a chiropractor for the brain. And your thoroughness is the most pleasing thing I've witnessed in years, or at least when it comes to work. -- Formidable et absolument superbe! Merci bien! / Ps. Of course I purchased your UE project on gumroad!
Wow thank you so much for these kind words about my work! It's the first time someone tells me that I'm like a Chiropractor for the brain, and I really like it haha Thank you so much also for pourchasing my project! have a great one!
One of the best tutorials I've ever seen! This might not be a Post Processing issue, but I was wondering how could I make my 2D Scene Capture Component also capture the outlines?
Hey Evan - really wonderful breakdown on the whole process. I especially love the way you organize with material functions, extremely helpful process! I'm implementing this and I'm noticing that the max and the min thickness for the outlines can not go below .5 without the lines disappearing. I'm pretty sure I've followed it correctly, I've checked it a few times... any ideas? Also I've noticed that on the thickness modulation as the lines recede into the distance there are almost steps between line weights changes - the line weight does not gradually blend from say a 5 to a .5 on a cylinder that starts close to camera and is aimed at the horizon. Again great tutorial and wonderful way to build this shader. Very helpful
Hi Jason! I'm so sorry for the late reply! As for your first question : actually, the thickness of the outlines defines the number of pixels you want it to have. Knowing this, the thickness should stop getting smaller when you go below 1. And for the thickness modulation problem, unfortunately I won't be able to give you a solution for this because I had the same problem and I don't really know how to fix it 😅 In my case, I usually have a single step happening at mid distance, but since it wasn't a big problem for me, I left it as is ^^ Anyway, thanks for your feedback and I hope you'll find a solution to your problem!
Very informative. I havent used unreal engine at all but these videos capture my wtrention bery well. May even try it out because of youre inspiring video, thank you man
Hy, to someone that are using it and grass output to put grass in world... since grass not have same way to enable custom depth, you can just subtract the scene texture : opacity, from outlines to exclude grass from effect (since the material from them are masked... and these remove any masked or translucent materials from receive outlines) ;)
Hey you're welcome! Thanks to you for this kind feedback 🙏 it's rewarding to know that I can help people all around the world with my knowledge of the engine 😊
Haha thanks a lot! I don't know if I'm smart, but it took me a lot of work to achieve this result 🤣 Anyway, I'm really glad to know that my knowledge can be useful to all the people who want to learn more about Unreal 😊
In case it helps anyone else, I scrubbed back and forth through this a dozen times and couldn't get the custom depth buffer to work. I was able to fix it by eliminating the 1-x node after the Step node in the Custom Depth Buffer function. Instead of pulling the output from the 1-x node to the A == B condition of the If node, ignore the 1-x node and use the output from the Step node.
Your video is concise and packed full of useful information. Chapters are great, structure of the video is great. I was able to recreate your solution while following along in no time. Top marks. I would have bought the premade pack but I needed this for a previous version of Unreal so wouldn't be able to directly paste it in. Keep up the awesome work 👍👍
Hi Ronan! Wow thank you so much for this awesome feedback! It was the hardest tutorial that I had to do (2 months of work) and seeing these kind of feedback is extremely rewarding 🙏😊 Thanks!
What's the best anti aliasing method to use with this? Some of them look terrible, when you move it leaves a trail behind like ghosting, one's still aliased af, the other conflicts with shadows and kinda makes it aliased when you're moving and there's an outline and a shadow from an object behind it
Hi Lorry! Thanks to you for taking the time to give me this feedback 😁 Yeah unfortunately, RU-vid doesn't like when people post links in the comment section 😕
I found the banana! Yes!! Thank you so much. I've been trying to make multicolored outline for the past 4 days, and this godsent master class solved every thing. Thank you so fucking much.
Haha congrats for finding the banana 😁 And thanks a lot for this awesome feedback! I've put a lot of hard work into this tutorial, and reading these kinds of comments makes me want to do even more 😊🙏
Thank you Evans! 4:00 Just leaving a note that 'Before Tonemapping' seems to be gone in UE 5.4... I used Scene Color Before Bloom, instead but the result is not the same.
Amazing tutorial! Can't believ I didn,t know about material functions before this, mindblowing!! You have some of the best tips and tricks out there. Thank you so much for the video!
Thank you so much for this in depth tutorial about outlines, I followed till about 1 hour because I only need single color outline in this project.... I know I'll come back for multi color in the future!! Everything worked fantastic! However after I packaged the game, the packaged version has a much thicker outline than I saw in PIE 😂 Do I have friends having this same issue? What might be the reason for this behavior? Thank you again Evans for the great tutorial!!
This tutorial is great, but I have found a problem within my scene. I want all objects in scene to have black outline and only a few of them to have different color outline? Im quite new to the UE5 can You help? @Evans Bohl PS. Found the banana
Hi Dariusz! If you used the color based on stencil, unfortunately you need to tweak the shader a bit to be able to have black outline again. Maybe you can try to put black outlines on objects that have a stencil value equal to zero?
Great video, but it would be great if you can get the outlines to work with Anti-aliasing.. to be they look like they are 1 bit, so i get jaggies where the thresholds are met, but it would be nice if you could control the edge quality better. (Im not thinking this is performant, btw, just the best possible look for offline rendering etc).
Yup totally agree! However when I make tutorials, I prefer not to use them so that people can replicate what I'm doing more easily :) If I use all the shortcuts I know, I'm afraid that the viewers won't be able to keep up with me haha Anyway, thanks for the feedback! :D
tes vidéo sont super merci à toi ! J'ai regardé ta video que tu avais fais sur les contoures de dessin animé il y a trois ans, je l'avais trouvé top, mais alors celle la est vraiment génial !
Hello Anatole! Ah ça fait super plaisir de voir des francophones sur cette chaine 😁 Merci beaucoup pour ton retour! C'est cool d'avoir des retours de personnes qui ont déjà vu la V1 de ce tuto 😊
Great content! Immensely helpful, and well put together as well! It must've taken you absolutely ages to get it all in order and right, greatly appreciated!
Heyyyy! Thanks a lot for your awesome feedback 🙏💙 I put a lot of work in each of my tutorials, and knowing that I can help people is rewarding 😊 Thanks again and have a great one!
