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[jcsymmes]

Been working with Unreal on a demo, but Do any of the popular graphical engines have a Sketch or toon style editor built in? Or alternatively is there any middleware  or scripting tools out there that has a similar effect?

Trying to create a water color style pencil look, and attempting to model it  in unreal just makes it look really werid. Any help here would be much apreciated.

Thanks. 

Scott

[Skofo]

Are you talking about cel shading, by any chance?

[jcsymmes]

Sketch shading is diffrent then cell shading but its a similar idea. I think okami used similar ideas but i am not sure that i know of a comerical product that has really used anything similar-though i maybe wrong here. in any case  Maya, 3d Studios and other programs can do it but i am not  sure how to do it in A 3D Game Engine.

this is test image that isn't appearing in the game-its very crude but gives you  but is the idea of the look here.   

[Sean A.]

Like a Valkyria Chronicles kind of thing right?

[Sigma]

I think you can do these stuffs using shaders. search for pixel shaders.

[drChengele]

There is no "easy" way to do this. You will need to do pixel shader kung-fu, and lots of it. Since you are working with 3d geometry you will need to tweak texturing/lighting, and possibly models, specifically to work with the sketch shaders. I am not sure how easy, or feasible, doing any of this is in the Unreal engine as I never worked with it.

Not to discourage you, it is probably not awfully complicated. But I would recommend you get some (lots of) pixel shader experience before attempting this.

[dubajj]

You can do this completely with a post process shader.

There is a great example of how this shader works at the XNA creators club http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/nonrealisticrendering

The basic idea is:

1) increase the contrast of your rendered image
2) read from a 'sketch' texture using a variable randomized offset (which gives it that shaky hand drawn look)
3) in negative color space (1 - color) combine the sketch texture value with the scene color value
4) dot product of the negative color space combination with a brightness constant

Sketch Texture:



output (before color multiply)


rough idea, not final code i didn't test this, its based on the above sample

Code:

float4 PixelShader (float2 texCoord : TEXCOORD0) : COLOR0
{
    float3 scene = tex2D(SceneSampler, texCoord);
    float3 saturatedScene = saturate((scene - SketchThreshold) * 2);
    float3 sketchPattern = tex2D(SketchSampler, texCoord + SketchJitter);

    float3 negativeSketch = (1 - saturatedScene) * (1 - sketchPattern);
    return dot(1 - negativeSketch, SketchBrightness);
}

[jcsymmes]

Thanks People!!

I guess i shall have to code to shade...then i shall code to shade!!