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[McMutton]

I did a bit of animation work, but nothing involving the art design. He just ended up using a similar gradient style, is all.

Making a new shader:


Right now it's just a normal map ramp shader. Any suggestions for nifty things I might add?

[gimymblert]

Depend on what you want to achieve. I found your style a strange mix of oversaturated color with heavy baked shadow. I have hard time to process it but in situation it pop it does work and it have its personality. So i'm not sure how to evaluate it. Why the fuck im sayin that? Ineed to go to bed.

However if feel like it you can try ambiant cubemap instead of ramp for lighting. It cam be extended to have reflection like material too. Have you try fresnel? Im sure a cartoon adaptation of pbr can open opportunity to a different lighting style and differentiate different material. Or maybe using screen uv to give paper like texture to desired element like shadow. I have toyed with a rendering that mimick skyward sword marketing artwork by ramping the light to mask a uv screen texture mixed with baked ao shadow. Also you could play with light falloff to have cartoon clear cut lighting. You can ramp the fall off too. There is various npr technique to toy with. Show me an illustration you like and i break it into shader layer.

Also a bit of contact ao shadow baked into the scenary, maybe just in the vertice, would help to smooth the hard edge in lighting condition. Hand colored ao.

[gimymblert]

Oh something nifty and certainly useless in your context. Uv probe. Basically create ambiant cube map from which you bake the uv projection of the scene. Then sample the cubemap color and use it to sample back the uv of the scene texture. Hey presto real time dynamic reflexion! If you change tbe scene texture the change are reflected on object that use the uv probe cubemap. If you draw to the scene texture it works too. An ambiant cubemap is in fact an area trigger from which you compute the position of a dynamic object to bias the sample a cubemap and compute the relative light or reflection from that position. It make cubemap spatially consistent on the object.

Of course all of these are overkill for your project lol :p

edit:
Other fun tool to play with is computing the curvature map to modulate effect. For example a percent of the variation between the lambert terms and the half lambert to modulate ramp lighting base on mesh or normal curvature with fdwidth or ddy ddx.

[McMutton]

...Man, shaders are confusing.

All of the shaders I found for Unity that use cubemaps instead of ramps seem to be lit based on the camera position rather than a scene's lighting, which isn't really preferable. I wonder, though, if it could be used to fake SSS using a color map or something?

Adding a paper texture to shadows sounds cool; I could totally return to the old painted look I had in the past with that.

PBR sounds really cool, as well. Though, from what I've read, nothing's actually been released for it, yet?

Concerning the scenery, I still need to bake lightmaps. Though I'm having a bit of trouble with that, since Unity's system doesn't seem to work well at all.

[gimymblert]

Too bad i dont have a computer anymore. Making some exemple would only take 5mn. Most of what i propose isnt hard if you use strumpy and get the basics...

[gimymblert]

For playing with artisque rendering you can use the unity shadowgun's Brdf free shader for mobile. It generate a look up lighting function texture offline ... Which can be abused to hand paint your atistic lighting. It basically a stack of ndotl ramp like you are using but indexed by a fresnel term. So you have varying light ramp according to the reflection angle of light.

There is also free unity code floating on the net for the penner's preintegrated skin shader aka piss shader. It compute curvature offline on a texture or online in the shader for deformation then use the result to pick from a stack of ndotl ramp. Similarly since it is a texture look up you can paint your own artistic desigb on it. It represent the diffusion of each color channel relative to ndotl and curvature. The flatter the less diffusion and the more it is like ndotl. Start with the altdevblog article. It simulate skin like subsurface scattering but not marble like subsurface scattering. There is a technique using ao from backfaced mesh to simulate the latter but never played with it. Look on the net for more information. I think it has some trouble with normal light interaction ans shadow but in a cartoon context it might fit the bill.

Also even though you cannot have multiple dynamic shadow in unity free due to lack of rendertexture and grabpass you can still implement the shader using static depth texture for casting static scenary on dynamic object but faking the depth comparison without depth sampling like in pro is a bit tricky. I havent fully test that too.

I have been toying with them but when i tried to find a way to combine them i had no more computer sad me

on cubemap try vanilla unity bumpmap specular. But it does not have the spatially varying awareness of ambiant cubemap. I havent implemented the ambiant version myself but you have some explanation an ref on the stephan lagarde blog from his work on remember me.

If you are good in math try to understand spherical harmonics. Ramp are basically a symmetrical light probe. If they describe a smooth ramp like in the above stack with offline accurate generation you can replace their 256 value by a mere 4 value per ramp. Basically replacing the value by a zonal harmonic function. Spherical harmonic lighting is basically a higly compressed substitute for smooth cubemap like for radiosity so ambiant map trick work too. Another use is to have dynamic ao or global illumination by baking spherical harmonics per vertex. Assuming you use it only on scenary with day night cycle lighting it will give good but richer approximation of shadow with the right vertex density. But spherical harmonics is pretty advence stuff due to the original math barrier. Even if the principle is super easy to understand. I havent crack it yet.

[gimymblert]

The actual ref:

fake brdf look up texture:



http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/03/23/shadowgun-optimizing-for-mobile-sample-level/

fake sss with Piss shader:
http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/12/31/skin-shading-in-unity3d/
http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2013/02/11/pre-integrated-skin-shader-unity-3d/

parallax corrected ambiant cubemap:
http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/siggraph-2012-talk/
sebastien lagarde shader blog: http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/

Hair shader:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/94270-Anisotropic-Highlight-Surface-Shader
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/168322-Unity-Character-Surface-Shader-pack-%28trailer%29/page2?p=1337215&viewfull=1#post1337215

advance subsurface/translucence using ao trick:
http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/09/11/translucent-shader-unity3d/
http://shadermb.blogspot.com/2011/12/cheap-and-convincing-subsurface.html
http://fr.slideshare.net/colinbb/colin-barrebrisebois-gdc-2011-approximating-translucency-for-a-fast-cheap-and-convincing-subsurfacescattering-look-7170855
http://colinbarrebrisebois.com/category/subsurface-scattering/

But all those is overkill and might kill your art direction if not use wisely, It's better to establish a visual target through concept art and reference and then use those technique to match the ref or the concept. However toying with them might also open new visual idea.

[gimymblert]

Other cool stuff:
texture trick:
http://technical-eden.blogspot.fr/2012/01/gradient-mapping-awesome-way-to-get.html
http://artisaverb.info/DitchingDiffuse.html

lighting with unity (concrete example of pbr and ambiant cube):
http://framebunker.com/blog/static-sky-unite-presentation/

much more in random list:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=32227.0

edit:
using the stack of ramp model, you can index the stack by another texture to have multiple ramp material in one shader or you can use vertex color to modulate it ... anything that modulate or clamp it (within define range, sliding the range, shrinking it or expending the range) it in fact to create nifty effect.

[McMutton]

You're like a shader encyclopedia, you magnificent human being. Those resources should be quite useful once I start getting into it.

Here, have some shopkeeper concepts. I no longer have a scanner, though, so I had to photograph them instead.


Amerile, who runs the Item Shop. She's out a lot searching for oddities to sell or collect.


Charles, the Champion Chef. He runs the most magnificent bakery.


Jaerem runs the Weapon Shop. He's easily embarrassed.


Sid, the insane alchemist. He does alchemy, like you'd expect.

[McMutton]

[Shiny]

It's been mentioned before, but you tend to make some elements overly bright/dark in relation to their surroundings. A lot of the individual elements look good, but they sometimes appear to be from disparate environments. The planters and daub in the city screenshot I think demonstrate this.

The land in the following screenshot is very dark. If you squint your eyes, then it becomes an indecipherable blackness. Meanwhile, the sky and water become even more overbearing.

This, however, looks very cohesive- not many faults here:

For the city screenshot, I tried to balance things out myself (though using filters so the results are unideal and overly saturated):

[gimymblert]

it might be bad gamma on his screen?

[McMutton]

I see what you mean, yeah. Is it the lack of lighting, or mostly just the textures?


Also, this guy:

[McMutton]

Made some modifications to Illya's main design:


And then got around to modeling the clothes she's found in:

[eigenbom]

Wow, nice!

[McMutton]

Thanks, man!

Here's this guy Zane. He's like Gil, if Gil were a tool.

[McMutton]

Speaking of Gil:

[McMutton]

Spammin' peeps:


Better wings for Aves folk, as well:

[gimymblert]

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121144&page=5
I'm sure this thread will be of great interest for you ...



edit:
Also I have a stable workstation, I can do shader mock up of things I have proposed now!

[eigenbom]

Hey muttons! Give us a beta!