All posts in cel-shading

We can implement a texture lighting ramp for finer control over our lighting cutoff points and use different stencil IDs to prevent strange outline overlap issues.

Outlines are a great way to emphasize the toon aesthetic, and we can add inverted hull outlines in a second pass.

Normal maps let us add finer detailing on an object's surface and change the way lighting interacts with the object. Fresnel lighting helps objects stand out in a scene.

By introducing a hard cutoff point in the lighting ramp, we can render cel-shaded lighting, which makes objects look cartoony.

Unity provides ways of accessing information about lights in the scene, and we can use the vector dot product to calculate the amount of illumination on the surface.

We use simplified models to approximate the way real light behaves. By splitting light into ambient, diffuse, and specular components, we can calculate light efficiently.

The cel-shading technique was used to stylize the look of many games such as Wind Waker and Jet Set Rario. This series of articles will explore how it works.