So, first off… I’m a programmer - not an artist, so forgive me if I am butchering these terms or blind to the differences between them, but I’m going for a look similar to the Borderlands 2 / Orcs Must Die 2 / Fortnite look… Cartoony… I’ve heard this is called “Cel Shading”. I’ve been searching high and low and I found Tom Shannon’s Post-Process pack “CelShaderAnime”, but that’s not really quite the same look.
So I was going to delve into making my own custom shader (which, by the way, I currently know nothing about but I am always eager to learn!). From what I understand is that I basically want to enhance the black outlines around objects, and mute the colors inside.
So starting with the outlines around objects, I was unable to find a way to do this in the post-process module without turning on Custom Render Depth for every object in my scene, which seems a bit ridiculous to me as I literally want to render EVERYTHING the same way…
So I started searching the forums… I’ve found lots of people looking to do the same thing (or similar) but I haven’t found anyone posting that they have found a solution yet… So I figured I’d ask again. SOMEONE has to know how to do this, there are several UE4 games out now that have this effect… If anyone could at least point me in the right direction, I’m willing to do some leg work to try to figure it out.
I’ve watched all of the material tutorials, but I couldn’t find a good set of post-process tutorials…
FWIW fortnite achieves its cartoony look mostly by just using cartoony art. There is no super cartoony post process and there are almost no cartoon outlines anywhere. The assets just have simple shapes and clean colors, and a somewhat ‘painted’ art style to the textures. Many objects even have lopsided or exaggerated shapes to make them appear even more cartoony.
At first this was prototyped by using the photoshop cutout filter on everything. Nowadays its more handled by artists by hand and with layer styles etc.
The post processing in fortnite is pretty much just some subtle color grading for the different times of day to make the colors pop. But when you turn those off its not like the game suddenly looks realistic or anything. Just helps us make the night look a bit more blue etc.
Thanks, I figured that the art itself plays a big part in this, but I saw the following video which achieves almost the exact look I’m shooting for and it was done with the standard UE4 assets…
P.S. I’ve looked at that thread (and numerous others), but they all seem to be talking about doing it against the CustomDepth renderer (I’ll look again). I couldn’t get the stylized renderer to do what I wanted, but perhaps I’ll go back thru it now that I’ve read up some more…
I see lot’s of posts that say “it should be easy, just follow ‘this’ post or ‘that’ post” - but none of those posts actually walk you thru it to explain what is going on or what to actually do, it’s all theory or UDK code. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by all of the other well written tutorials I’ve come across… Perhaps it’s just because mentioning the word ‘Shader’ makes my stomach turn… Who knows???
