Diffuse is hurting this alot in my opinion, the shading you're adding in with the diffuse seems too dark, and over done. Try getting a nice amb occ bake out of xnormal maybe to work from.
if you're really going for a cartoon style, its time for a redo to be honest. But if you're going for that quasi-real pleasing art style you were initially executing pretty well, I'd make some minor changes, mainly to the diffuse. Here's my quick paint over. Let the engine do the shading, or do a good ambient occlusion…
EDIT (DELETED) EVERYTHING I SAID BEFORE! just search cube in the content browser...find any cubemap and plug that into the parameter. all that does however is just adds some ambient color to the diffuse.. with or without that step it will still work
Thanks guys I'll got on to the diffuse shortly. Cheers Oniram, I was actually working from that re-work and as far as I can tell, I've followed it accurately. The MLM_Custom blendmode was a big help but I'm still getting the same overall effect. I've tidied up the material a bit and taken a enlarged view of it.
Had some time to move forward with this with the feedback which was great. Projected the normals and started a diffuse. Here he is in UDK. A lot of work still needs to be done on the skin, particularly in trying to add in different tones, but getting the fur part to have appropriate surface definition has worked quite…
That texture really isnt doing it for me. Its almost like a Quake 2 model, in fact, with how much dark blobby shadow there is on the diffuse. In fact I may even go as far to say the model looked better in the high poly renders BECAUSE it was a nicer even flat colour, and a much nicer colour at that. EDIT: I just lowered…
you should multiply the diffuse with the rimlight, instead of (what looks like in the image), your AO. that way the rimlight will be green instead of white. also the entire shader should be plugged into Custom Lighting, the blendmode needs to be set to MLM_Custom. Neox updated the shader to take out some old techniques…