Troubleshooting

No outline appeared

Six causes, in the order they actually happen. Tools > Outline Zero > Validate Setup checks the first four in one click, and selecting the outlined object usually tells you the rest.

1. The outline system is not set up on the renderer your project actually uses. By far the most common. A project can contain several renderer assets, and setting up the wrong one looks exactly like a package that does nothing. The Validate Setup button always picks the one in use.
2. The object’s layer is switched off in the settings. The Inspector says so and offers to switch it back on.
3. The object has no Outlined component. No component, no outline. Adding it to a parent covers everything under it.
4. The feature has no settings asset assigned. Validate Setup creates and assigns one.
5. Auto Tag is off and the material’s layer number does not match the component’s. See Pro Mode. This usually gives you a wrong colour rather than nothing.
6. The object is only visible to an overlay or UI camera. Outlines come from the base camera.

The feature’s Inspector also shows what the last rendered frame did: which mode it used, which layers were in play, how much work it did, and, when it drew nothing, why.

The outline is the wrong colour

• Two overlapping objects on different layers? The higher layer wins, by design. See Layers.
• Very thin objects such as ropes or railings can take a neighbouring layer’s colour. It is a known limit, described on the Layers page. Keeping Downscale at 1 or 2 minimises it.
• In Pro Mode, the material’s layer number wins over the component’s. The Inspector warns when they disagree.

A transparent object grew an outline of its own

It should not. If you see this, that object’s shader is writing to the stencil buffer. Either stop it writing stencil, or restrict its writes to the upper half of the stencil (bits 4 to 7), which is where URP’s own features live.

My screenshot has a transparent or strange-looking background

Expected in Performance mode, and nothing is wrong with what is on screen.

• Taking ordinary screenshots? Force alpha to 255 when you save the image, or save it as a format without transparency.
• Does your project actually use this camera’s output as an image with transparency, for compositing or portals? Use Compatibility mode for that camera. See Rendering Modes.

Turning MSAA on cost me a lot of frame time

You are probably in Compatibility mode, which is expensive with MSAA on phones and headsets: around 15 ms on an Adreno 650 and 38 ms on a Mali-G68. Switch to Performance mode, or turn MSAA off.

If you are already in Performance mode, check the feature’s Inspector. A colour format Performance mode cannot run on makes the package fall back to Compatibility by itself. The usual cause is HDR at 32-bit precision: set HDR Precision to 64 bits.

Another effect in my project stopped working

Outline Zero uses the lower half of the stencil buffer (values 1 to 4). URP’s own features use the upper half. If something else in your project writes to the lower half - a RenderObjects feature with a stencil override is the usual one - the two collide. The validator scans for this and names what it finds.

If you own the conflicting shader, move its stencil writes to the upper half. If you do not, put that effect on a different renderer.

Objects from Entities Graphics or the GPU Resident Drawer are never outlined

They cannot be outlined automatically. Use Pro Mode for them.

Something else

Two things make a bug report easy to act on, and both take one click:

• The feature Inspector’s readout of the last frame.
• Whether Tools > Outline Zero > Validate Setup reports anything.