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[_Tommo_]

Btw, awesomeness apart, I still think that the wii one is done offline via mipmap hacking, because
-wii can't possibly render to texture at that speed (DOF and blur are predefined hardware effects, so the wii can do them for free without RTT)
-the whole compositing is really heavy for something at Dx7 level
-and most of all, the individual brushes are invariant on camera rotation. That means that the brush pattern DOES NOT change when you move your camera around, even if you rotate or get nearer to things.

And I think that with a rotation the individual brushes change quite a lot in your shader, right?

[Trevor Dunbar]

That's pretty damn good, now I feel bad I just banged my head against the wall and accomplished nothing.

[gimymblert]

I have lost my jaws on the ground 
If you can make it work on unity free more cake, unity pro might be enough if not possible (no render to texture)

edit:
More on wii

The TEV unit (what is has instead of pixel shaders), is nothing more than a texture combiner system. It can take a maximum of 8 textures and combine them in 16 stages. It takes in texture data, and outputs pixel/quad colours. It cannot affect geometry whatsoever, which is why Hollywood can't do things like displacement mapping (the patent is for emboss bump mapping, not displacement mapping).

http://amnoid.de/gc/tev.html

They might do a render to texture, pass it to the TEV unit and display it on a (or multiple) quad facing the screen at a certain depth to simulate brush DOF (that's how they do with blur, you can see it in many GC game)

[Farbs]

Cheers all!

I'm pretty sure the SS effect is not mipmap hacking, or at least not mipmap hacking by itself. The effect is not constrained to poly boundaries, which mm hacking can't escape. There's definitely something else going on.

I don't know much about the Wii hardware so can't speak to that.

Unfortunately I don't think unity projectors can arbitrarily sample from what they're targetting, so I don't think that'll work as an RTT workaround.

I noticed a bit late that this thread is under "paid work". I'm really not interested in doing any paid work, am just interested in futzing around with the effect. If anyone wants to implement the technique I described (or any other technique) and claim the that's fine with me.

[gimymblert]

Will you release the udk shader for the world to look at or at least provide the "source" (in code or an image of that visual uk shader thing)?

[_Tommo_]

I'm pretty sure the SS effect is not mipmap hacking, or at least not mipmap hacking by itself. The effect is not constrained to poly boundaries, which mm hacking can't escape. There's definitely something else going on.

Nah, in fact it is constrained. The only thing that bleeds over are tree leaves and grass, but then it is easy to make the sprite quad bigger to make room for the "bleed" part of the texture.
The rest of the "bleeding" is made using hardware DOF.

But as Gimmy says, it is quite possible that the Wii can do that in realtime... still, I don't think it does for that patter/rotation invariance thing.
While there's a subtle flickering in small image details that could mean there's a filter... I guess only Nintendo knows!

[JobLeonard]

I'm keeping a close eye on this thread.. looks like some nice graphics tricks may come out of it

[PompiPompi]

I also think it's a "particle" effect, only the particles seem to have orientation(in screen space).
From my observation it seems that, brighter colors strokes are always(or usually) above darker color strokes. And there is some sort of orientation for the strokes(maybe also size) but I am not sure how they decide on the orientation. Maybe based on the surface's normal. And if it's fixed function I am not sure how they are doing it, probably some CPU processing is invovled.

Edit: Oops, missed the second page.

[rogerlevy]

I think Farbs is onto something.  My idea couldn't be done on the Wii, but I think it might get a cool result too

I think that in Zelda they used that effect with different "smear directions" for each object or maybe used normals to extrude each polygon along a variety of angles

[Trevor Dunbar]

I've played some of the game now and it looks very similar to what Farbs has done-- it seems to only apply the effect to things very far away in the depth buffer. It reminds me a lot of pointillism.

Part of the painterly look is definitely in just the texturing as well.

The Wii must have some fixed functions you can call when the card is done applying DoF.

[gimymblert]

I have been playing too and notice some artifact, actually on my SD TV you see plain dot and not brush strokes, it use maltiple way to render the same effect too (or the same trick but with multiple context, I'll explain). There is temporal inconsistency similar to what you get with pixel, the place where it's not having that use a different trick, mostly edge highlighting of mesh.

It's rendered very smartly on the screen, it use multiple quad facing the camera and render to them, the closest quad get bright spot cut off, the further quad get darker spot, character and interactive stuff get rendered above. When you go into first person the effect disappear and plain texture with ugly bilinear appear. Most fake effect might just be a conjonction, when you leave a slash mark on mushroom, it get brushed, but looking at the mart in FP show a plain decal, so the effect is above, basically building are a bit lower poly for what the wii can do (but have clever design to hide them) the brush strokes that appear when you are far from them might just be a cel shading type of inverted triangle to outline get brushed by the effect to sort them from background. Many brush could be just that, texture or mesh that appear under certain condition to create emphasis with the effect lay above, just like the decal. Their thickness is what create the temporal consistency. Water and material element don't get brushed so far, The brushed work with the texture style, the overblooming of brightspot create strong shape.

I think duplicating a pixel might not be that costly for the wii, it might be just taking one texture, , alpha cutting it according to lightness,duplicating all pixel in six direction and overlaying it to multiple front facing quad.

Basically the brushy style we create on this thread wasn't intended in the game, it's more like a bloomy dof in the real game cleverly made. We had create something more awesome.

About unity, we might just project triangle flat on screen space and apply a pixel shader on them to fake screen space shader?

[Nix]

Here's a paper illustrating how particles are used to achieve this effect: http://www.incognitek.com/painterly/downloads.htm

It doesn't look exactly like Skyward Sword, but I feel like it could be adapted pretty easily to look pretty similar