To achieve the look of the 2D concept I’m going to need to sort a few things out.

• Edge detection for the cartoon outlines
• Textures or a Toon Shader

Edge Detection:

The default Triangle Depth Normals seems to work well. Once I’m creating environments i might need to revisit this solution. a custom shader might be necessary, but we’ll see. I’m noticing some extra edges being drawn that I think can be handled with some mesh edits. but I’ll need to test this theory.

(edit. that was it!)

Texture/ToonShader:

Looking into the various free options online, I tested a few out in unity to see which ones looked like they might work. I didn’t like a lot of the free options for various reasons, one being the way 3D Toon Shaded objects react to light while moving.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=39594&d=1431721699

I’ll do some texture work to keep things grounded and dirty, and since toon shaders can still work over them it seems like the way to go. I’ll revisit this once i have an environment built, to see if everything meshes well together. I’ll probably need to dig into shader code at some point or at the least some tutorials for ShaderForge, but I have a lot of things to do before I get there.

Some additional links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cel-shaded_video_games