Cel Shading - Level Changing

[Archerx]

Hello everyone, I have made a new behind the scenes video of Bizango Blast. In this video I reveal the "secret" of the cel shading outline and show you how to load and unload levels using kismet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Hk48mJmPA

I'll be making more, next video will be about how the ball is shot and how the controls are done.

These are not indepth tutorials but if you have any kind of handling of the UDK you should be able to get the concepts and execute them yourself :)

[Showster]

Cool share!!!, Used the cell shading technique on the pic below about 6-7 years ago works a charm if you can afford the polys. Also you can unwrap the black layer to a single black pixel.

If you do not want lighting at all on your meshes you can always set the emissive to be based on the base texture

http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/9/8517/hud.jpg

[Acecutter69]

yeah the bad part is doubling your poly count, another way is to paint the edges on the texture it self, but depending on the object is looks tacky, but for boxy models it works fine, its almost like painting the uvs in :D

[taxial]

Level loading section was VERY helpful. I knew it would be easy.... it the discovery part that is difficult for me.... and this video makes it clear. Thanks very much Archerx.

[Francescu]

Hey thanks Archerx !

How do you make objects to appear / disappear depending on distance ?

[rlc2405]

The cell shading trick gives a amazing result! Very good!
The next one (ball and controls) will help me a lot with a little game I'm trying to make, cause involves a kind of cannon like yours!
thanks in advance!

(as usual, sorry any mistake with my brazilian-english :)

[Archerx]

@Showster I thought the UDK didn't like overlapping UVs? If it's possible to just map the black outlines to 1pixel that could be interesting. Also instead of using emissive won't it be better to just set the material as unlit?

@Acecutter69 now poly counts aren't so important so it shouldn't be that much of an issue

@taxial Yea it took me a long time and a lot of testing to get it to work, using load and unload levels lead to massive slow downs after a while and using the open map console command made it hard to have persistent variables!

@Francescu I used distance culling; http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html#Distance Culling very useful for optimizations!

@rlc Thank you! I'll have the new video up next week :)

[Showster]

@Archerx,

1) If the outline is always going to be black does it matter that the uv's overlap (dunno)?

2) If it is faster for the material to flagged as unlit if so yer sure ignore what I said about emissives.

[Francescu]

@Francescu I used distance culling; http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Visib....html#Distance Culling very useful for optimizations!

Thanks Archerx we let you know when it become useful to us :)

[Acecutter69]

yes they are, poly count determines performance and specially dealing with mobile specs, you will be shooting your self in the foot by ignoring them. A box might not be a problem but a 1500 tri character becomes a 3k character, a 1'000'000 poly environment becomes a 2 mil one, think of it this way, each tri you have on your model is basically a draw call, the more of them the more draw calls you make. Take the new Rage free thing, it looks nice high poly for mobile and it runs like it skips 4 frames out of 10, please do not ignore your processors limitations.

[OmegaBlue36]

hey Archerx, is it possible to get a rundown of how you did the points system? What i would really like to see is the points that fly up based on the blocks being knocked down. Is it a particle emitter?