Outline

Overview

The go-to pixel-art finishing node for drawing a line around a sprite's opaque silhouette. It greatly improves character and item readability, so it often appears near the end of a game-asset graph.

Usage tips

• The defaults—thickness 1, black, outside—already work well. One node is enough to lift an asset that disappears into the game background.
• Set padding first when an asset has no canvas margin. An outside line cannot be drawn beyond the canvas, so a tightly cropped asset loses part of the outline.
• A line color slightly darker than the asset's darkest color often blends better than pure black. Bind color to a variable or palette reference for managed color schemes.
• If corners on a 1px outside line look jagged, turn pixel_perfect ON to clean up extra L-shaped pixels.
• Use outline_only to extract only the line and composite it wherever you want with blend.

Common pitfalls

• The line breaks or is missing on one side: the silhouette touches the canvas edge. Set padding to at least the line thickness.
• The line is uneven around a translucent edge: anti-aliasing makes threshold boundary detection unstable. Raise or lower the threshold until it settles; 0.5 is normally right for pixel art.
• An inside line makes the fill look thinner: Inside replaces opaque pixels with the line, which narrows small assets. Consider an outside line plus padding.

Notes

• Even with placement = Outside, output dimensions match the source. Outline pixels beyond the canvas are clipped.
• With placement = Inside, the line is drawn inside the source as before.
• Set padding only when output dimensions should expand. It adds the specified amount of transparent padding on every side.
• With outline_only = true, source-image pixels are omitted.
• pixel_perfect is raster correction on a binarized image mask, not vector correction derived from a path.
• pixel_perfect_side = SourceSide cleans L-shaped corners relative to the side touching the source; OuterSide uses the outside of the outline band.
• If pixel_perfect_side = SourceSide would create a transparent hole, correction fills it with source color for a natural connection.
• If outside correction with placement = Inside would spill the fill, the fill is trimmed as well to stay consistent with the outline.
• pixel_perfect_also_outer is an extra option for SourceSide that removes remaining outside L-shapes in one more pass.

Examples

1. Add an outline to pixel text or an icon.
2. Use outline_only to keep only the edge as a separate layer.
3. Use placement = Inside to draw an inner outline within the source fill.
4. Combine pixel_perfect with a 1px outline to clean up L-shapes.
5. Add padding so later compositing does not clip the line.

Related nodes

• drop_shadow — cast a shadow rather than drawing an outline
• glow — create a soft luminous edge
• surface_outline / surface_edge_highlight — outline and edge processing for Surface assets from 3D
• anti_alias — soften jaggies after outlining