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Hi,

2 warnings: I don't know much about shaders, and I still haven't bought Amplify Shader Editor.

There's a certain shader effect which I'd like to achieve: I want certain objects to always render on top of certain others, but that relation must be kept just to those objects involved; when it comes to other objects, they should render in normal order. I'm not great at explaining things, so please take a look at this picture: https://images3.imgbox.com/d8/6b/gmo249VQ_o.jpg


If somebody wanted to recreate a character that looked like that in 3D, the eyebrow and black eyelids should always render on top of the hair. When it comes to everything else, the order would be kept normal, but when it comes to that character's hair, it should always render behind the eyebrows and eyelids. Am I making sense.

I think that kind of effect can't be achieved through stencils shaders.

I am wondering: does ASE have the tools to do it?

Thanks.

Hello, thank you for getting in touch and for your interest!

It might be tricky to pull this one off, as it will mostly depend on how you decide to implement this type of effect.
You could possibly setup an overlapping mesh, use a mask, or even create a custom multipass shader as a flexible and advanced way to deal with this sort of situation, each method with its own pros and cons.

There's also a chance that you'll stumble upon issues with depth ordering when dealing with transparent hair / brows, which are pretty common in Unity, but there are several means available to help deal with this, such as the Render Queue and additional Depth parameters.

We've replied to a similar post here with a pratical example.

In short, you can create almost any sort of effect through ASE, even custom shaders to accomodate for specific workflow and pipelines, only being limited by your shader knowledge. It's a great tool to learn more about how shaders work as well, as with any visual node based editor.

Thanks a lot for your answer, I'll be checking those out