Blueprints to succeed.....Hopefully!
So for this project I wanted to create a scene with a little something different, I decided to look at cell-shaded games that have almost comical style to them, yet are still somewhat accurate in the size of the buildings etc. Therefore a thick line around the outside of the building giving it the style intended.
The cell shaded style in UE4 was rather difficult to create; I had to play around with it for quite some time to get the desired effect.
I started off by creating a post processor volume box around the scene and set it to unbound as well as adding an element to the blendables panel in the post processing tab. I then created a material, in which I changed the material domain settings to post process as well as the blendable location to before translucency. From here I created the basic cell shader blueprint which I had researched prior to creating the scene.
This consisted of masking the RGB and Alpha channels separately subtracting the depth, then adding them together again, finally clamping them down by colour and a numeric digit.
(Sounds difficult... which it was! )
However this version was outdated and therefore broken.
The resulting effect occurred.... not what I wanted.
I then played around with the blueprint by adding distance scene depth using scene depth textures, masking them and dividing them. I then clamped them between the original blueprint and this made the scene visible, yet gave it a paper like feel to it.
This effect was rather interesting and quite balanced. The lack of colour and paper style gave the scene a minimal effect that was rather expressive and fluid. The subtle style also gave the scene a rather unique mood that resembled games such as White Night and Mad world.... however the tone and mood of these games fit the dark and mysterious film-noir genre, something I am not going for in this project, as well as the fact that it will completely eradicate the use of colour in the texture sheets. Nevertheless I will keep this segment of the blueprint for future projects!
Moving on I decided to add another element into the blueprint which was the outline glow and this broke the scene... predictably! After squishing the bugs and ironing out the creases I found that the scene emerged like this.
Closer to what I wanted, however the background is pitch black! This was an issue as I wanted some directional light in the scene as well as lights that effect the shadows etc, so realistic lighting in a not-so realistic scene. This was rather annoying to set up as I play around and get rid of or re-make various parts of the blueprint.
From here I re-modified the blueprint and with a stroke of luck and hours of working at it I had finally came out with what I wanted.
As you can see the scene now can hold colour as well as have realistic lighting and background. The scene is also unique as it is bright yet minimal, however the eye-popping cell shading outline brings out the small details in the mesh.
As you can see from the screenshots I have already started to create buildings for the scene, so for the next post I will show the models I have been working on as well as them in scene. I will also explore level design for the level.
Until then, farewell!
Hazrat
