The quest for very wide outlines (Ben Golus)
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Ben Golus
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Ben Golus's 2020 Medium post explores GPU silhouette rendering when art needs outlines far wider than one pixel. From Unity production work, it walks screen-space methods before adopting the jump flood algorithm (JFA).
He compares inverted-hull mesh expansion, optimized brute-force mask search with stencil and mip limits, and separable Gaussian blur, with 1080p timing charts. The conclusion covers JFA init and flood passes, distance compositing, and sub-pixel edge recovery for anti-aliased masks.
Intermediate readers should know render textures, command buffers, and HLSL in Built-in or URP; the linked gist expects custom blit passes rather than a turnkey asset.
The post is free with diagrams and links sample Unity code on GitHub that others port to URP renderer features.
Teams cite it when stock outlines fail at large width; it is a common JFA wide-outline reference in Unity.
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