Guilty Gear XRD shader in Unity?

Base

Hey all, I was curious how close I could get to achieving Guilty Gear XRD's toon-like shader look in Unity, and what techniques would be best to look into. I admit I'm pretty new to shaders, but I'm pretty curious about what a shader like this takes, and whether Unity can do it without performance hiccups.

For reference, here is the opening video of the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ9Cd4MKqHs

As you can see, it has a really cartoon-styled look while defining all the right lines and edges, and having really nice shading.

How much of this is the shader, and how much is texturing? What kind of things should I think about while working with it? (i.e. they tend to use pretty 'flat' parts with low amounts of painted details, should I do the same to keep it looking good?) It seems more complex than just slapping a toon shader on it and making some changes. This is made in the Unreal engine as well, which I know has some robust shader abilities...

Anyone know where to start?

DireWolf

Check out Chev's 2 posts, translated roughly from Japanese developer of Xrd. There are a lot more going on than just shading. The article also explains and shows textures.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121144&page=10

Base

Wow, that's intense. I knew a lot went into it but that is pretty dang impressive nonetheless. I don't think I'll need to achieve a purely anime look but using it to sell a 'cartoon' look could be very useful... And most of that seems to be some magic with the normals as well as vertex color and texture manipulations.

Thanks very much for the link. I guess the breakdown for doing that look is much larger than "How do I make the lighting more interesting in cel shader" which is basically just that lower part of the whole writeup. I'll have to dig into shaders and figure out what I can fo in this department!

3D_director

Just in case anyone else is reading this thread, I was an ex Softimage user for 15+ years, and I transported the principles of the Guilty Gear Stylized shader series into Blender as a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer. Check this out >>
I also started the GranBlue Fantasy Versus stylized shader playlist >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUvAFpyQF3U&list=PLv8Xik7JbQH2XkhIq_8cwhgPQBL0jeKJL