Best Engine for Matching RWBY's Style with Occulus Rift Support

Charlie

I'm currently trying to build a 3D Environment of some of the scenes from the show RWBY. It's a 3D Anime show from Roosterteeth.

The style they use is a mostly single colour or slight gradient with light texturing in places. Here are a few screenshots.




They don't seem to have any actual shadows and just have and variation painted into the textures. Would something like this be accomplished by just have 100% ambient lighting so that there aren't any shadows?

I'm building the models in Maya and then wanting to import them into an engine. I'm receiving an Oculus Rift on Tuesday and want to integrate that with this project. I know UDK and Unity Pro support it and I believe the Source Engine and CryEngine do in parts.

I would like to use UDK for it as its free support for the Rift.

Unity Pro does support it and I have a 4 month free trial but I'd rather have something that was permanently free for developing this but I can work with it if it will give me the best results.

So after all that rambling my questions are:

Which Engine would you recommend to use?
How would you suggest creating this effect?

Sorry for the rambling, I'm still figuring out how Maya and UDK work so I don't quite know where to start.

Obscura

This can be done with using an Unlit shader, or with using very bright ambient color. To achieve the outlines, you can use duplicated, pushed and flipped geometry, or an edge detecting post process shader, but the duplicated geometry method is easier. For the textures: Use just "basic colors" and paint a little ambient shadowing where its needed. Looks like you don't need to paint surface details. Also, you can help the outlining with drawing a few of them into your texture, since the outline shader or the duplicated geometry method would place outlines only around your objects, and only around your object's elements. Hope this help to lead you to the direction that you are looking for. Any engine can do this by the way, because everything from here is achievable with a little tricking.

thomasp

the deciding factor will be the oculus support. for now unity seems miles ahead in that regard and is really easy to pick up and preview stuff on, too. sadly the free demo only runs for four months and as of yet it is not clear if there will be the option to use unity free for the rift, seems to depend on some graphics rendering feature(s) that as of yet are exclusive to pro.

check out https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=35 and compare UDK and unity levels of support and user feedback.

cost aside it appears unity is the best choice by far.

not much in there regarding cryengine, are you sure they have rift-support in the free SDK? or is that just about some game that has been modded to work with the rift?

e-freak

freeSDK has rift support.

Charlie

Thanks very much for the replies guys.

I found out that Emissive textures get that 100% lit look that I was trying for in UDK.



I'm going in and painting subtle variations in the textures to make the joints more visible.

I'll probably try and paint as much of the "outline" look on as possible and find a shader if I really need it.

My Rift is arriving on Tuesday so hopefully I can accomplish what I want to with UDK. Nothing super complex, just an environment with a few interactive menus that would pop up on the HUD.

We'll see how it goes though. Dealing with one problem at a time as I learn all this stuff.

Thanks again for the advice!