Toon/Comic/Spider-Verse/etc Shader

Variable framerate, noise, halftoning, flat lighting model...

Most toon shading is too perfect and just looks 3D, especially when the camera orbits.
I had some ideas to add imperfections to the lighting and framerate to sell it better as 2D cels/drawings.

Guilty Gear's too-smooth camera orbits made we want to see if stepping the characters' rotation and position in increments to simulate a low framerate rotation would sell them as 2D drawings in a 3D environment. Spider-Verse renewed my interest in trying out variable framerates and adding realtime halftoning and a tunable lighting model to the usual toon shader.

[thehyperstar]

I still keep coming back to this. No game out there has managed to reach this level of quality. Good work.

[thehyperstar]

It’s really the “jitter” and the way the character faces the camera that sells it. Great job, I really want to do this in the future.

[Blueboyrave]

Just like you, I was intrigued with guilty gear's work and more recently with spiderverse. But this is a whole other level man, it's amazing!

[RaymondCripps]

This looks amazing dude! Saw this on twitter, keep it up!

[fractyja]

Awesome! Please, share with us how you did it.

[ToThePower]

like everyone else here, i'd literally pay any amount of money to get this shader. Name! Your! Price!!!

[AngryAx]

Awesome! I want my next game to look like that. You really nailed the motion.

[KasperFrandsen]

This is awesome work. I hope to see more details on how this is done.

[NickBaijens]

I've seen a tutorial for fairly similar materials show up for Blender, and have been looking around to see if something similar could be done in Unity. Really awesome to see it's possible. Awesome work!

[bukachell]

the one that looks like sketches is incredible

[creationsmaxo]

Great work! In reality, toon/manga/comic shader is actually the future of cartoon mobile games because frame-based 2D sprite is can easily be as much as 20x heavier than its 3D simulated counterpart and the 3D based shader can be resolution-less, meaning you can zoom in and out of a character without any need of having higher resolution in its textures (unless 2D sprites).


The only difficulty of this shader which not many are seeing is the complexity of the models. It's not complex in the usual way, but the modeling has to be done in a way that allows the shader to properly be displayed. For example, sacrificing the normal for an higher poly mesh is often more optimized and has better results visually when the shader is optimized with fast single passes. (I know because I wrote a super simple cel shader for a mobile game and it runs smoothly even on old mobile hardware and, to my own surprise, works even on mobile via WebGl in Unity, which for those who don't know, is supposedly really hard to support.)


I do have 1 question about this shader though. Is the screentones done from with a texture imported as a file or from a procedural texture done from a mathematical formula and projected on the screen? I'm asking because I made one myself with procedural texture and calculating motif in a way that work on was the biggest pain in the butt I have even accounter in Shader. (Considering how pixels on screen are identified by ID, meaning from 0 to millions.)

[MrHannatas]

Please release this on the asset store!

[BOOLitGameStudio]

How did you achieve this frame rate control over animation and rotation. Is it in the shader or is it a script? I'm working on a project and have been looking for something exactly like this. Looks really sick(as in good)!

[SrExperimental]

SELL THIS OR TUTORIAL PLEASE .... I NEED THIS (: *)

[tionanima]

by my eye it loks to be a combination of vertex+ displacement, procedural hatch lines masked to area of hard shadow(rampshader)( maybe normal advected) and vice versa for the highlights @ 1:15 plus screenspace outline

[horelpit]

Another willing paying customer here. This is everything I'm needing :)

[SubzeroBlack]

Let us know when you ready to throw this in the market. I would rather get something with quality like this

[Smash_ter]

The interesting thing I learned about this stuff is that i know it could be achieved in built in/standard without needing camera scripts and you could use grabpass + CRTs to do something similar

[dotnexdotnex]

could you make tutorial for 1:10 plssss
i wanna learn to make that shader it looks like my favorite game borderlands 2

[lobster]

Please make a tutorial! I want the graphics in my game to look like this, but I can't find it anywhere!