Isolating Edges Of A Mesh

[finepointcgi]

Hello!

First I want to say thanks for making such a great program. Its really elevated my work and my understanding of shades in Unity. Im running into a problem with isolating the edges of a mesh to apply detail like damage. I don't even know where to begin, most of the nodes I don't know what they do so im sure im just missing something. Could a shader be made that Test adjacent polygons to find corner of the geometry. Any help would be appreciated.

Kind of like this https://docs.unity3d.com/540/Documentat ... ffect.html but I want to apply a normal map instead of drawing a line.

Thanks,

Mitch

[Amplify_Borba]

Hello!

First I want to say thanks for making such a great program. Its really elevated my work and my understanding of shades in Unity. Im running into a problem with isolating the edges of a mesh to apply detail like damage. I don't even know where to begin, most of the nodes I don't know what they do so im sure im just missing something. Could a shader be made that Test adjacent polygons to find corner of the geometry. Any help would be appreciated.

Kind of like this https://docs.unity3d.com/540/Documentat ... ffect.html but I want to apply a normal map instead of drawing a line.

Thanks,

Mitch

Hello finepointcgi, thank you for your support and kind words!

Regarding your question, detecting edges using only a shader can be a bit tricky, usually you would aid the process by providing some additional information to work with.

We recommend vertex painting your edges in order to mask the intended textures as a rather simple way of achieving the effect you desire, be sure to check out this cool free vertex painter.

You would then use a node setup similar to the following one to lerp between a damaged and non-damaged texture by using the previously painted Vertex Color channel as the alpha.

image (10).jpeg (232.71 KiB) Viewed 2858 times

Another interesting solution for damage detail would be to use a decal system, such as this one.

Please let us know if you have any further questions, thanks!