toon shading?
polycounter lvl 10
Hey guys, I finally just picked up a 360 and was playing tales of vesperia. I think I'd like to investigate toonshading and environments next as my next 3d learning experience. Also I'm looking at a more stylized toonish shading like in valkyria chronicles for ps3. A few questions though....
Aside from illustrate and ink n paint, is there another method of doing toon shading? is there anything else baked into the textures?
I know generally the shading is left to the shader, but just how much texture info does there need to be? Does anyone have examples of texture layouts/games that use it?
Are there any game engines for pc out there that support model imports like unreal that use a toonshader? How would i best display work of this sort?
Aside from illustrate and ink n paint, is there another method of doing toon shading? is there anything else baked into the textures?
I know generally the shading is left to the shader, but just how much texture info does there need to be? Does anyone have examples of texture layouts/games that use it?
Are there any game engines for pc out there that support model imports like unreal that use a toonshader? How would i best display work of this sort?
Replies
As for the outline, there are also some ways how to do it, the simplest would be a ramped fresnel, like a superthin inverted rimlight multiplied to the scene, but this doesn't work for flat objects.
You could also do it the hardcore old school way. With a pushed inverted model, but that really kills the polycount, so you should keep that in mind before you consider doing it, you should work with way less polygons, unless you can do some vertexshader trickery to get this done. This was done in XIII and okami for example
The last way i know if would be an imageanalysis, you use the depth information and scene normals to generate an outline, afaik it's not possible with ut, with coding possiblities it should be possible in unreal 3, thats how i suppose they did it in Valkyria Chronicles, Naruto or in Prince of Persia.
but this could be a modelled outline too with some shader tricks to make it appear a bit more lose
and my experiments on that topic
modelled outline with shade depended hatching (having it only in the shadows would give in cleaner results)
modelled outlines have the downside that they do not scale by distance, so the will start flickering, but you could lod them away, or push them further by a vertexshader
pixelshader outline with a fresnel term
pixelshader outlines have the downside, that they don't work well on flat surfaces, you can see the problem on his bag, it's getting totally darkened, don#t know a way to control that
that's why we almost dropped the outline, we won't work on that feature until we know better ways to create the outline.
oh and as you to took a look onto tales of vesperia, they've got a pretty solid way of doing static painted inlines works pretty good if you construct your models to support those lines
but something is odd with the basic chading of the char what happened to my shader o_O
New computer now so hopefully I can start playing around
[ame]