Toon Shader Testing

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  a top-down render

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  a perspective render

Inspiration

Roystan.net has some great shader tutorials that I had been meaning to follow for a while, and this was just a great opportunity to do some learning.

What it does

Shaders and materials are the blueprints for how 3D models are rendered. The 'Toon Shader' Style is a non-realistic rendering approach to materials based off the blinn-phong reflection model [that you have probably seen - it's the 'basic material' for most 3D render softwares]. The primary differences are in the thresholding of light and shadow to create very clear and defined areas of light and shadow.

How I built it

I created a unity project with a basic [and slightly odd] player movement script (sorry if you free-float forever... whoops), then set to work following the tutorials. Not very original, but educational! I have previously worked with rendering and shaders when I studied abroad, but this was my first time really trying them in Unity.

Challenges I ran into

I also wanted to use this hackathon to experiment with Shadergraph [a node-based unity shader language] but it requires a custom rendering pipeline that, when not created before the project, destroys custom shaders. :,( I was also planning on getting into Substance Designer [an Adobe material / substance creation system] but did not feel like working on the imports after having to recover my work on the toon shader.

I'm also working on refining the movement a lot more. WebGL builds are also known to be more sensitive

What I learned

I understand how unity creates and handles vertex and fragment shading! :o And as a result of breaking my shaders for a bit, I also learned a lot more about the custom render pipeline and how to use it for post-processing.

What's next for Toon Shader Testing

I am working on a project to get my shaders to render like an impressionist painting, which is going to include a post-processing kernal technique for rendering brushstrokes. This project is just sort of a learning foundation, and has taught me how I'm going to need to prepare my shaders for that.

The WebGL Link will be added later after render

Built With

• unity