Harald wrote

Unfortunately this is an artifact based on how the outline is created. It tests your texture at 8 locations which will cause these patterns at sharp-angled corners < 90 degrees. The solutions below are not perfect, but will improve the situation:

Solution 1 - Using mip maps:
You can enable Generate Mip Maps at the texture in the Texture Import settings in the Inspector.
Then at the outline material you can adjust Advance - Outline Mip Level until you are happy with the outline shape.

Solution 2 - Painting a very transparent border:
Paint under any sharp corners with minimum opacity (e.g. 1 / 255) which is barely noticable, so that the resulting corner is >= 90 degrees. Alternativaly, you can also add a very transparent rounded border around your image whole image via e.g. a Stroke effect in Photoshop, where you want the outline to be painted.
Then at the outline material, reduce the outline width to a small value, and set the Advanced - Outline Threshold value below the painted value, e.g. to 0.001.

do you have any advice on doing this after export without breaking the atlas? I tried to do this to the atlas png in the unity asset after it was imported from spine and it just broke everything and stopped rendering.

nixarn wrote

Hey,

We used to have an effect on our enemies when they got hit, that was done with the _FillColor, which is nice as you can have values higher than rgba(1,1,1,1). But as modifying the shader values broke the batching that wasn't ideal. Then I read that you can just change the vertex colors and that won't break batching (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-unity#Changing-Materials-Per-Instance)

However it still seems to break batching. The only thing I do now, is when an enemy get hit I do the following:

skeleton_animation.Skeleton.R = 1f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.G = 0.2f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.B = 0.2f;
skeleton_animation.Skeleton.A = 1f;

As soon as that's called, the material is changed from "enemies_Material" to "enemies_Material (instance)" so I unity creates a clone of the material and breaks batching.

What might I be doing wrong? Thanks a lot!

Edit: Hmm I switched to Unity's normal sprite shader and it seems to work again. Does that make sense?

Niklas

I'm new to spine but generally speaking if you talk to a shader via c# scripting at runtime in unity it will create a new instance of the material that shader is running on always. So you're not doing anything wrong that's just how unity works. One way around it is to talk to the .sharedMaterial instead of the material directly if you are trying to affect something for many objects but even still all of those objects will now be broken out of the initial rendering batch and processed separately. Is it causing a performance concern for your project? generally a few instanced materials that break batching should be okay

I'm trying to modify the shader to have a much more pronounced thickness as well as some soft alpha falloff but I'm running into a lot of issues mostly a result of my poor knowledge of shaders. From what I understand the outline would be thicker if the sprite assets that were used in spine had more padding originally? Is there any way that I can tell spine to export with some extra padding? otherwise, anyone have any advice on modifying the shader? It's a bit out of my skillset tbh and I'm lost