As far as suggestions relating to the cel shader go, I’m going to put up a series of blog posts showing how to recreate various animation styles, because there’s more to it than just settings inside the shader. Depending on your style you can get some really high detail but super fast artwork going on with only a minimal content workflow. Anything to help make the shader easier to adopt is worth doing I reckon.
As for other projects, I’m not sure! I’d really like to finish a game but that’s probably years away. I’m more about finding ways to do new things, but maybe “finding a way to quickly release episodic content” falls under that.
“Go to the Misc tab and add a CelShader preset instance as a blendable, e.g. CelShaderDirtyManga.”
I looked up post process volumes in the ue4 documentation, and got even more lost. It says “Simply assign one or more post process materials to a postprocess volume in the Misc section to the Blendables. First press the + to add new slots, select a material in the Content Browser, and press the left arrow to assign it. The order here is not important and unused slots are simply ignored.”
Find your post process volume, if you don’t have one, go ahead and add one.
1: After finding the volume, click on it from the scene outliner
2: After clicking on the volume, click on the details panel, scroll alllllll the way down until you see “Misc”. Just under that, you should see “Blendables”.
3: After locating the Misc section, as well as blendables, click the “+” sign across from blendables
4: After doing that, you should see an extra line appear under blendables. Select the shader you wish to use (It’s a material instance)
5: After choosing one of the delicious shaders, and having it selected, go ahead and drag/drop it onto that line, or click on the arrow point at the box that says “none”.
6: MAKE SURE THAT YOU SET THE VOLUME TO “UNBOUND”
Like this:
Ok got it thanks, although I"m glad this part was shown in the thread:
"Ah, I got you. Open up the sample project in the Unreal Editor and select all of the files in the “Presets” folder. Right-click and choose “migrate”. It’ll tell you what it’s about to migrate (every supporting file) and then ask you to select the destination Content folder. Choose the Content folder within your target project, then open up your other project again.
This is how you’ll always want to move assets between projects. Just copy-and-pasting will break a whole lot of things. "
Had me lost for awhile lol. I’m not used to migrating everything usually just hit import for textures. Ue4 is the only program I’ve ever used where you can’t just copy and paste files.
Excellent examples You’re right, it needs a video tutorial on how to get started. I think I’ll do that tonight.
Yeah, the migrate thing is annoying! I originally wanted to do the celshader as a submodule in my projects so that you can just pull updates, but this doesn’t work at the moment and doesn’t fit in with the way the marketplace does things.
I continue to be obsessed with multi-coloured water. It’s quite pretty, but a still shot doesn’t do it justice. The two shades of blue are from the shader settings, the purple is the result of a calculation slipping into the negative and there’s a oily brown shadow around the edge of the water. I’m digging it.
More improvements to cel outline shading. Now it can be as wild or as tame as you need. It’s possible to make it thick and jagged yet still soft and only hinted at.
Completely rejiggered the water shader as well, inside and out. Many controls now operate more as you’d expect them to and most controls have been renamed for clarity. You can set the foam texture, foam distortion, foam edge colour and foam edge shadowing colour, as well as contrast, thickness and falloff for all options. There’s also a “realism” control, which shifts the water between highly cartoony and relatively realistic looking:
The new parameters are here:
Naturally it looks better in motion. Video coming tomorrow!
I saw some people were using the Matinee Fight Scene to test their shaders. This is my take on it. I’ve used exclusionary shading to only shade the characters, leaving the rest of the scene untouched.
Edit: Exporting a matinee, it turns out that captures the motion blur nicely:
Looks good so far, but I think the Textures looks like they are not that good for this Sort of Shader. And I miss the typical Shadows on the Characters?
Yeah, one side effect of switching to cel shading is you lose a bit of lighting during the process of smoothing out unwanted details. The video was mostly to show that you can drop it into any project and make it work with minimal effort - the best solution will still be one with textures and lighting appropriate to what you’re doing.
You do have control over it though - there’s a couple of controls for strengthening or weakening shadows and in the matinee fight I turned them down to make the difference more stark and flat shaded. In the pirate screenshots from earlier I amplified his normals to get the same effect as you’ve got above, his shading isn’t baked in any way. Apart from the adjusted normals he came straight from Mixamo Fuse:
The end result is a combination of self-shadowing and dynamic lighting interacting with the normals, you can see his head is casting a dynamic shadow somewhere other than his clavicle now, but his clavicle is still strongly shadowed using AO. The AO changes more under his arms than anywhere else (but it’s still subtle as his pose hasn’t moved much). I’ve found relying heavily on dynamic shadowing looks processed and not pleasing to the eye, whereas this is a nice compromise.
Thx for this Infos, good to know and see. I use Fuse too. Wish there would be a Software like Fuse for more Anime like Characters… but, ok, that is a other Topic.
Fuse isn’t actually too bad for importing your own character models. You basically set up your model then adjust your UV islands in such a way that all of one arm fits in one area, then all of another arm’s UVs fits in another, etc. It uses that to separated out the pieces of your model into the arms, legs, etc. Check out the separate character example that you can download from their site.
