Hello,
I’ve been trying to make a model swap mod for Silent Hill 2 remake (UE 5.1.1), and I would like to have a toon shader/cel shader on my model. Unfortunately, the game does not support custom materials, and I cannot just put a shader onto a material and call it a day. You must make material instances out of the game’s original materials, or the texture would not load.
This is how one of the game’s materials look like (ClothStandard)
Here is how the model looks like in blender with MMD shader (material preview)
and rendered with a light source in front of her
My workflow:
- Use unofficial Cats plugin to import MMD model (.pmx) into blender
- Adjust armature, etc, to fit SIlent Hill 2 player model
- Export as .fbx using unofficial cats plugin
- Import into Unreal
The mod works, but I cannot get a toon shader effect on it due to the constraints of the materials I have to use.
I’ve tried the following things:
-
Just put the textures in there with no shaders
Result: works but visually appalling - anime girl models without shaders look horrific
-
Loading a toon shader (this one) into unreal, putting my textures in there, and baking it onto the model with “bake out materials”, selecting Emissive (the shader only bakes a black image with diffuse)
Result: Slightly weird looking texture in unreal engine 5. Looks extremely strange after being added into another ingame material with an Emissive channel
-
Baking the texture in Blender, using the MMD shader and a light source
Result: Even with the texture baked in Blender (tried diffuse without light, diffuse, glossy, and combined), the model looks like it doesn’t have a shader in unreal engine. -
Loading the original .pmx model into Unreal 5.2.1, with IM-for-UE5 and VRM4U, hoping to bake a useable texture out of it.
Result: The texture and materials do not work properly with the plugins and appear odd in unreal engine
I’m almost out of ideas here, what other things can I try to get a toon shader effect with only basecolor, normal and ORM textures?