Does Crytek ever plan on opening up their shader system? Similar to what UDK has?
No idea.
In their community letter they said there will be shader code.
Later they claimed that opening shader code would like releasing source of engine and they won't do it.
We may at some point see graphical shader editor (like in udk), but I wouldn't hold my breath on it.
They did for CE2, but it was pretty poor. They essentially inserted 'pseudo-HLSL', meaning you could write your own shaders but had to know how to declare stuff manually based upon snippets of code hidden in the engine. I think you could very easily declare Blinn as H or Half, but for those of us who didn't know, it was essentially declaring the same line twice for no reason.
It also was a nightmare when it came to consolidating the shader, since you couldn't make heads or tails on where each function was being put (EI: I couldn't find the finale line which usually I find in ALL other shaders like: Albedo/Diffuse + Spec + Etc).
So for CE3, they pretty much scrapped this idea.
I think so far, there is ONE indie game that used the Cel-Shaded look from CE2, and it was essentially like Borderlands.
yes it does lol.. obviously theres a lot more to it than that but black outlines is one of the main effects of the shading technique.
It's become a catch-all term with fans to describe outlines - instead of actually SHADING like it was a painted animation CEL. It drives developers crazy, especially the guys at Gearbox :P
Cel-Shaded, is when the pixel shader itself on the model is doing all the extra work to get a look which cannot be replicated via mesh or standard Lambert term, and it creates this 'gradient' or stepping effect. You can have a Cel-Shaded model without Outlines.
The only reason people still associate this with that, is because cartoons mix the two all the time, that's the only reason.
cel shaded shaders try to make a 3d model look like 2D animation... The black outline on cartoons, anime is there to make them read better. It's an easy way to create contrast. I'm not sure how 3d artist take offense to the term cartoon or cartoony, but whatever. If cryengine has a falloff material you might be able to create a simple cell shader with a lot of work. I personally don't like the cell shaded look on a lot of games because it just looks tacky. It just hard to make it look good in my opinion.
Try Methagen shader type. It's a very powerful class with tons of properties which can probably get you some results you're looking for (rim appearance, shade masks, etc, if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, it's not documented, but it was used in Crysis 2 rather widely.
You can also try rim lighting settings in Skin shader, but I'm not sure it allows darken stuff instead of brightening it up. Still, worth a try.
Unfortunately, there is no simple way to do that. As an extreme solution, you can use external injector, Boris Vorontsov style, as depth-based outlining is a simple enough effect.
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So it's option b then? Sounds expensive.
Does Crytek ever plan on opening up their shader system? Similar to what UDK has?
In their community letter they said there will be shader code.
Later they claimed that opening shader code would like releasing source of engine and they won't do it.
We may at some point see graphical shader editor (like in udk), but I wouldn't hold my breath on it.
It also was a nightmare when it came to consolidating the shader, since you couldn't make heads or tails on where each function was being put (EI: I couldn't find the finale line which usually I find in ALL other shaders like: Albedo/Diffuse + Spec + Etc).
So for CE3, they pretty much scrapped this idea.
I think so far, there is ONE indie game that used the Cel-Shaded look from CE2, and it was essentially like Borderlands.
yes it does lol.. obviously theres a lot more to it than that but black outlines is one of the main effects of the shading technique.
It's become a catch-all term with fans to describe outlines - instead of actually SHADING like it was a painted animation CEL. It drives developers crazy, especially the guys at Gearbox :P
Cel-Shaded, is when the pixel shader itself on the model is doing all the extra work to get a look which cannot be replicated via mesh or standard Lambert term, and it creates this 'gradient' or stepping effect. You can have a Cel-Shaded model without Outlines.
The only reason people still associate this with that, is because cartoons mix the two all the time, that's the only reason.
Read the following: http://myfeldin.com/programming/cellshading.php
You can also try rim lighting settings in Skin shader, but I'm not sure it allows darken stuff instead of brightening it up. Still, worth a try.
Unfortunately, there is no simple way to do that. As an extreme solution, you can use external injector, Boris Vorontsov style, as depth-based outlining is a simple enough effect.