Anime Visual Novel style shading - The Result

[BishyT]

Hey, a couple of you might remember me as the one asking numerous shader based questions.
Well, here's the fruit of my efforts. (click for full size)









This was done for my university project in shader development for stylistic rendering within videogames. Here was my source image:

[Crusha K. Rool]

Wow, looks great. Care to show the diffuse so we can see what is the work of the shader and what the work of the artist?

[BishyT]

Ok, here is a resized diffuse map (the original is 4096x4096), and a shot of the node setup. As you can see, it's quite complex. The shader also uses a normal map, a mask, an opacity map, three gradient ramps, and a shadow texture.
Oh, and please note that the anisotropic specular setup is based on this Unity shader: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?ti...ghlight_Shader

[Team_SD]

could you please post a package with a sample material? the nodes are impossible to read on that image you provided. i've been doing a shader similar to that, but not as good:



i believe your shader suits more what i had in mind. would you kindly share it?

[BishyT]

I don't want to release too much right now, as this is all part of my masters degree project (if I release too much info, and the plagiarism checking software sees that my work is similar to some guy on the internet called BishyT, I might end up being accused of stealing from myself...it's happened before to other people). I do promise though that once my masters is finished and I graduate, I will release the entire dissertation (which includes a detailed guide on how to create each individual part of the shader) to the public. The final dissertation will not only include this particular style, but will also include a dynamic manga screentone style, and a more painterly style inspired by Fable 3's concept art.

If you haven't guessed by now, the masters is about stylistic rendering.

Btw, your shader looks quite good right now. I'd say you might want to tone down the painted on shadows (not completely, but make them a lot lighter and softer) and to instead try and apply a normal map to the chest area (as well as wrinkles in the form fitting outfit).

Until then, I recommend looking at the TF2 shader tutorial if you haven't already, it's a great place to start. http://www.moddb.com/games/unreal-to...shading-in-ut3

EDIT: Another thing i'd like to note, my shader is heavily dependant on having a particular light setup (specifically, it requires a dynamic directional light, and a skylight).

[Team_SD]

wow, i had no idea things were so strict on your side. Well then, good luck with your degree, i'll be eagerly awaiting your shader's release

Meanwhile i'll take your comments and try to improve my shader. in fact it is a set of parametric shaders, one to do the colored outlines in the post-processing, and all the others are regular materials that through instancing can accept color reduction, mapped textures, mapped normals, mapped specular, mapped alpha, color shift, a bit of fresnel with a parameter to enable or disable on normals or completely, and whatever i feel like it's justifiable to have changeable on the fly. It's got a lot of the TF2 shader methods in its theory, but i'll revisit that site just to make sure i can add smooth tone edges.

[BishyT]

I'd be very interested to know how you managed to get the coloured outlines. I was under the impression that with sobel edge detection outlines could only be in one colour (hence why I didn't use it in my anime yet, though I am using it in my manga shader which only requires black outlines).

Oh, in case you're curious, here's the manga screentone effect:

It's not a post-process, it's a surface shader (I edited the default skybox shader to include the screentone effect), so you can use different screentone patterns on each surface (patterns are controlled via a gradient map). The only post-process is the sobel edge, which is taken directly from the UDK Gems.

[Team_SD]

the colored outlines are made from a shader i found, here: Polycount Forums.
in that link you will find a package, containing the material and some instances of it. EDIT: it was done simply by setting the material blend mode to additive and the color to anything but solid black, tweaking opacity in the instance won't work.

and that is another wonderful shader, it's almost like an authentic manga book b/w illustration, kudos.

[TJ_MkII]

Just so you know, I'm fairly certain that the maximum texture size for a DX9 texture is 2048*2048. Anything larger is scaled down to this, so save yourself some memory and pre-scale that huge image (especially considering the lack of detail it has, really you could get away with a 1024, maybe even 512 at a push).

[BishyT]

Just so you know, I'm fairly certain that the maximum texture size for a DX9 texture is 2048*2048. Anything larger is scaled down to this, so save yourself some memory and pre-scale that huge image (especially considering the lack of detail it has, really you could get away with a 1024, maybe even 512 at a push).

That may be so, but I am currently using DirectX 11 to get the best possible results. Even so, I think 512 might be going a step too far; the lips and eye detail would be blurry beyond comprehension. I might have a go at halving the texture size though, they were mostly made that large for convenience when painting them.