Thomas Kobelsky's BlogFilled with reviews, rants/raves, and puns. |
Unreal 3 - Material Editor
| While working on the project Hench, I had to figure out how to create a cel-shaded environment in the Unreal 3 engine. Since there wasn't a lot of support for the Unreal 3 engine at the time, I had to figure out a lot of the pieces on my own by trial and error and I tried about five different character Cel-Shaders before I got to one I liked enough to use. I would like to take this time to thank user ffejnosliw of the Unreal forums for sharing his shader, which I then heavily modified to fit the look I was after. A much more indepth explanation can be found at our Dev Blog. | |
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While the character shader took a lot of time to create in the Material browser, the environmental shader was extremely simple, but took more time in 3ds Max to set up. I have a walk-through video on the right showing the steps I went throught to achieve this look. |
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There's several things that I am very proud of with these two shaders. Firstly, with the characters, there is only one texture being used at any time by any and all the characters at a time, and it's only 2x2 pixels in size. Another thing with this shader is that it only uses 2 instructions to draw on screen, as opposed to the 300-some instructions a regular UT3 character requires. With the environmental pieces, the diffuse textures are typically only 256x256 pixels in size, but their normal maps and specular maps are larger, at 1024x1024 pixels. Also, I experimented with some new ways to use specularity, which included using colored textures for the spec maps. Doing this, I was able to have a color reflection on surfaces, giving a different kind of function to the specularity slot. |
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v13.26.34