https://gfycat.com/ColdRemoteAndeancat
Today I decided to do a quick experiment.

Hardware “blend modes” have existed since the dawn of hardware-accelerated graphics. Primarily used for effects like transparency, they allow a developer to specify the way new colors are drawn into the buffer through a simple expression.

color = source * SrcFactor + destination * DstFactor

The final output color is the sum of a “source factor” term multiplied by the value output by the fragment shader, and a “destination factor” term multiplied by the color already in the buffer.

For example, if I wanted to simply add the new color into the scene, I could use blend modes of One One; Our coefficients would be negligible and we would end up with

color = source + destination

If I wanted a linear alpha blend between the source color and destination color, I could select the terms SrcAlpha, OneMinusSrcAlpha, which would perform a linear interpolation between the two colors.

But what happens when we have non-standard colors? Looking back at the blend expression, logic would dictate that we can express any two-term polynomial as long as the terms are independent, and the coefficients are one of the supported “blend factors”! By pre-loading our destination buffer with a value, the second term can be anything we need, and the alpha channel of our source can be packed with a coefficient to use as the destination factor if need be.

This realization got me thinking. “Subtract” blend modes aren’t explicitly supported in OpenGL, however a subtraction is simply the addition of a negative term. If our source term were negative, surely blend factors of One One would simply subtract the source from the destination color! That isn’t to say that this is guaranteed to work without issues! If the render target is a traditional 24 or 32-bit color buffer, then negative values may have undefined behavior! A subtraction by addition of a negative would only work assuming the sum is calculated independently somewhere in hardware, before it’s packed into the unsigned output buffer.

Under these assumptions, I set out to try my hand at a neat little trick. Rendering global object “thickness” in a single pass.

Why though?

Thickness is useful for a number of visual effects. Translucent objects, for example, could use the calculated thickness to approximate the degree to which light is absorbed along the path of the ray. Refraction could be more accurately approximated utilizing both incident, and emergent light calculations. Or, you could define the shape of a “fog volume” as an arbitrary mesh. It’s actually quite a useful thing to have!

Single pass global thickness maps

So here’s the theory. Every pixel in your output image is analogous to a ray cast into your scene. It can be thought of as a sweep backwards along the path of light heading towards the camera. What we really want to determine is the point where that ray enters and exits our object. Knowing these two points, we also essentially know the distance travelled through the volume along that ray.

It just so happens that we know both of these things! The projective-space position of a fragment must be calculated before a color can be written into a buffer, so we actually know the location of every fragment, or continuing the above analogy, ray intersection on the surface. This is also true of the emergent points, which all lie on the back-faces of our geometry! If we can find the distance the ray has traveled before entering our volume, and the distance the ray has traveled before exiting it, the thickness of the volume is just the difference of the two!

So how is this possible in a single pass? Well, normally when we render objects, we explicitly disable the “backfaces”; triangles pointing away from our camera. This typically speeds things up quite a bit, because backfaces almost certainly lie behind the visible portion of our model, and shading them is simply a waste of time. If we render them however, our fragment program will be executed both on the front and back faces! By writing the distance from the camera, or “depth” value as the color of our fragment, and negating it for front-faces, we can essentially output the “back minus front” thickness value we need!

DirectX provides a convenient semantic for fragment programs. float:VFACE. This value will be set to 1 when the fragment is part of a front-face, and -1 when the fragment is part of a back-face. Just render the depth, multiplied by the inverted value of the VFACE semantic, and we’ve got ourselves a subtraction!

Cull Off // disable front/back-face culling
Blend One One // perform additive (subtractive) blending
ZTest Off // disable z-testing, so backfaces aren’t occluded.

fixed4 frag (v2f i, fixed facing : VFACE) : SV_Target {
return -facing * i.depth;
}

Unity Implementation

From here, I just whipped up a quick “Camera Replacement Shader” to render all opaque objects in the scene using our thickness shader, and drew the scene to an off-screen “thickness buffer”. Then, in a post-effect, just sample the buffer, map it to a neat color ramp, and dump it to the screen! In just a few minutes, you can make a cool “thermal vision” effect!

Issues

The subtraction blend isn’t necessarily supported on all hardware. It relies on a lot of assumptions, and as such is probably not appropriate for real applications. Furthermore, this technique really only works on watertight meshes. Meshes with holes, or no back-faces will have a thickness of negative infinity, which is definitely going to cause some problems. There are also a number of “negative poisoning” artifacts, where the front-face doesn’t necessarily overlap a corresponding backface, causing brief pixel flickering. I think this occasional noise looks cool in the context of a thermal vision effect, but there’s a difference between a configurable “glitch” effect, and actual non-deterministic code!

Either way, I encourage everyone to play around with blend-modes! A lot of neat effects can be created with just the documented terms, but once you get into “probably unsafe” territory, things start to get really interesting!