we are programming a 2D game in XNA. Now we have polygons which define our level elements. They are triangulated such that we can easily render them. Now I would like to write a shader which renders the polygons as outlined textures. So in the middle of the polygon one would see the texture and on the border it should somehow glow.
My first idea was to walk along the polygon and draw a quad on each line segment with a specific texture. This works but looks strange for small corners where the textures are forced to overlap.
My second approach was to mark all border vertices with some kind of normal pointing out of the polygon. Passing this to the shader would interpolate the normals across edges of the triangulation and I could use the interpolated “normal” as a value for shading. I could not test it yet but would that work? A special property of the triangulation is that all vertices are on the border so there are no vertices inside the polygon.
Do you guys have a better idea for what I want to achieve?
Here A picture of what it looks right now with the quad solution:
You could render your object twice. A bigger stretched version behind the first one. Not that ideal since a complex object cannot be streched uniformly to create a border.
If you have access to your screen buffer you can render your glow components into a rendertarget and align a full-screen quad to your viewport and add a fullscreen 2D silhouette filter to it.
This way you gain perfect control over the edge by defining its radius, colour, blur. With additional output values such as the RGB values from the object render pass you can even have different advanced glows.
I think rendermonkey had some examples in their shader editor. Its definetly a good starting point to work with and try out things.