Tag: ShaderForge

by RobElsworthy

Animation Style

Research time! Looking at a lot of Anime gifs lately.

Reminds me of how much I love motion. I’d like to incorporate this where possible, mixed in with a more classical animation style for the character moments. There are a couple of hurdles to achieving that look in 3D I’ll need to solve. Time for some Technical Directing!

  • Rigging the model for Squash and Stretch scaling.
  • Smears on fast motion.
  • Secondary motion/action

Squash and Stretch:

This is a high priority. The first tests I imported to unity scaled the child bones as well as the parent. I haven’t found a good solution yet for this. Counter scaling the child bones to compensate seems like it would have some hidden problems. I remember many issues with scale in the past. Stay tuned for the results!

Smears:

Blendshapes and bones would both work (and maybe some extra geometry). I’d like to have total control of each frame. I’m going to test Vertex Shaders and see how far I can push things. I purchased ShaderForge to test this out. Not cheap but it seems like I’m going to need it for a lot of things.

Secondary Action:

The delay of extra parts like clothes and hair can really enhance the realism of motion as well as add some flair. I’ve incorporated some robot parts that will work for my character. His head bob, antenna sway and telescoping robotic arms will all help. I considered automating these features with physical simulations, but i’m having fun doing it by hand, and the added control is a bonus.

by RobElsworthy

Visual Style 1.1 – Toon Shaders

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