Cel/Toon Shading Material Help UE4

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with the right approach, you can achieve Luffy life looks! Maybe combine various techniques such as texture manipulation, material setup, and post-processing effects?

  1. Create a new material and assign your textures to the appropriate slots.
  • Adjust the material properties to achieve the desired stylized look. This might involve tweaking the colors, roughness, and specular values to match the anime shading style.
  1. Using Drawn Shadows:
  • To make the shadows persist even when the character is fully lit, you can use a technique called texture masking.
  • Create a mask texture (thresholdtexture) that defines where the shadows should appear. In this texture, areas that should be shadowed should have values closer to black, while areas that should remain lit should be closer to white.
  • In your material, multiply the drawn shadows texture with the threshold texture, using the alpha channel of the threshold texture as the mask. This will allow you to control where the shadows appear based on the threshold texture.
  1. Achieving Fusion:
  • To achieve the fusion effect you mentioned, you can experiment with different blending modes and material setup.
  • One approach is to use a blending mode such as Multiply or Screen to combine the textures and achieve the desired fusion effect. You can try different combinations and adjust the blending factors to get the desired look.
  1. Post-Processing:
  • After setting up the material, you can further enhance the anime-style shading through post-processing effects.
  • Use the Post-Process Volume in UE4 to add additional effects such as bloom, tonemapping, and color grading to achieve the desired overall look and feel.

tldr to achieve the desired anime-style shading:

  1. Importing Textures:
  • Import your textures into UE4 and ensure they have the correct settings (e.g., sRGB enabled, compression settings).
  • Let’s assume you have two textures: shadowTexture for drawn shadows and thresholdTexture for the threshold mask.
  1. Material Setup:
  • Create a new Material in UE4.
  • Double-click on the material to open the Material Editor.
  • Drag and drop the shadowTexture and thresholdTexture into the Material Editor.
  1. Drawn Shadows Persistence:
  • Right-click on the graph and search for “Multiply” node.
  • Connect the shadowTexture to the A input of the Multiply node.
  • Right-click on the graph and search for “Texture Sample” node.
  • Connect the thresholdTexture to the B input of the Multiply node.
  • Right-click on the graph and search for “Texture Sample Parameter 2D” node.
  • Connect the alpha channel (A) output of the Multiply node to the Opacity input of the Texture Sample Parameter node.
  • Rename the Texture Sample Parameter node to “MaskTexture”.
  • Connect the MaskTexture output to the Opacity input of the Material’s output node.
  1. Fusion Effect:
  • Right-click on the graph and search for “Multiply” node.
  • Connect the Multiply node to the A input of the previously created Multiply node.
  • Right-click on the graph and search for “Texture Sample” node.
  • Connect the shadowTexture to the B input of the Multiply node.
  • Adjust the blending factor of the Multiply node to control the fusion effect. You can connect a scalar parameter node to control this value dynamically.
  1. Post-Processing:
  • Exit the Material Editor.
  • Place a Post-Process Volume in your level.
  • Adjust the settings of the Post-Process Volume to achieve the desired bloom, tonemapping, and color grading effects.

Remember to experiment with different settings and adjustments to fine-tune the material and achieve the desired anime’s styles’ shading.

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