Cel Shading

#1 Cell shading,...isn't that just a fancy word for Toon rendering? i used to be part of the 3dgamestudio forums, and that was always the impression I got for the shader guru's, but i could be wrong. I have-never heard it called that since i came to the light side of the force;)

#2 Well, not a "fancy" word ... just the correct term :P But yeah, "Toon rendering".

Dont suppose youve got any idea how to? :P

-Henry

#3 Do you have Render-Monkey or FX Composer? FX Composer has one listed on the nvidia site that is a .FX file, so you will need to seperate the pixel, and vertex shader as the FX file is both,I use render-monkey as there is a Tutorial in the resources section of this site showing the setup and conversion of the glitter shader to TGEA. I would start with that Tutorial, and go from their, if you have trouble finding a cell shader it yell back and ill find one....in a couple of weeks i have to write one so Ill post it when its done if everyone really wants it:)

#4 Thanks alot Bobby!
Ill look into getting Render-Monkey and if i have no luck, look forward to your shader ;)

-Henry

#5 ShaderX3 has an article on Dot3 cel shading. That might be worth checking out.

#6 RenderMonkey comes with a couple of good DirectX cel shading examples. Just for testing purposes, I implemented one onto TGEA's orc.


Getting it in was pretty easy, it went almost straight in. See Brian Ramage's shader importing tips for a RenderMonkey-to-TGEA conversion how-to.


-- M. Cooper

#7 Thanks, ill take a look at that!
Only thing with that one is it looks like the one i already have implemented which is 1 solid colour, not taking texture colours.

-Henry

#8 Actually, I later modified the shader to take texture colors, but I never bothered to take a screen shot.

It's really easy. You just get the base pixel color via a texture sampler object, then modify it based on the intensity of the pixel as described by the cel shader.


-- M. Cooper

#9 Yeah, i did try to get it working on the shader i currently have. The shader its self is a bit buggy anyway so ill try one of the rendermonkey ones.

-Henry

#10 That's exactly what I was talking about, I'm glad to see other people try help others, so often i see posts go unanswered. Back on topic..... I would take the simple, 1 tone color-toon shader and then look at the more complicated one running in render-monkey, to get an idea of how to add in the other textures/colors. Hope that helps you, but I can get to this until i finish with the multiple terrain, detail textures I'm dragging myself through:)

#11 Bobby, how is that going, by the way? I've been working on it a little too, without much luck :P

#12 I was wondering if anyone has got some sort of outline cel shading in TGEA. I'm looking to add cel shading to my project but I'm not sure where to begin. I'm wanting the cel shading to look something like this.

www.futuregamez.net/ps3games/pop/pop2.jpg

#13 Hi, I would also love some additional information on doing cel shading with an outline like in Penny Arcade Adventures.

All of the resources and posts that I have found are geared toward TGE and not TGEA and I'm not confident at how applicable the TGE articles from 2002 and 2004 are to TGEA version 1.8.1.

I understand a good cel shader from RenderMonkey can be ported pretty easily to TGEA, but what about outlining? Any idea on how this affects system performance? Also, are interiors typically done with just clever texturing?

#14 Is outlining the same as a Lambert shader?

#15 Lambert just implies Lambert's laws of diffuse light. The best outlining technique would probably be to use z-depth and object normals and construct outlining in image space via a fullscreen shader. For the most part, outlining is just edge detection.

#16

Quote:All of the resources and posts that I have found are geared toward TGE and not TGEA and I'm not confident at how applicable the TGE articles from 2002 and 2004 are to TGEA version 1.8.1.

They have no relation. TGE (at least without the modernization kit resource) can't run shader programs. Those TGE resources are all about getting a cell shaded effect the "hard" way; when no shaders can be used.