Since I am good at modeling 3d objects, but rather terrible at texturing them, I decided to write a script to generate a texture map. The script generates an edge highlight map, it essentially darkens any areas close to a sharp edge, based on the distance to the edge. Its also possible to change how sensitive it is to edges. ie: at 10, it will only count an edge as sharp if the angle between the normal's of its faces is greater then 10 degrees. Below you can see an example:
I also wrote a shader. The shader takes the information in the edge and draws a solid color, depending on the distance to the edge. This allows it to produce a "thick" edge highlight affect, such as the image below:
Below, an image of a simple spaceship using the script and shader:
As you can see, there are some artifacts, this is due to some defects in the script, and aliasing. After fixing the script and adding antiailiasing+bloom for the glow, we get a much cleaner look:
Its still a bit tricky with depth perception at this point, so I made the shader a surface shader, by combining unity5's new lighting model, and the previous edge highlight shader. This makes it affected by lights and produces a nice affect:
Whats really cool about the script though, is that it works for any 3d model, so that means the only bottleneck for adding new modules is how fast I can model one and import it into unity. This is really exciting because It gives the project a unique look, and it makes it possible to have lots of modules.
