These are some examples. Its the kind of stuff I see a lot on Supercell’s material.
I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, though. Don’t know if that’s a matter of shader, ilumination, etc. Probably the sum of a lot of things.
But bottom line is I’m wondering how to create this visual quality within a game.
these pictures show global illumination, that’s what makes it look so vibrant. as far as i can tell, the shading model is probably phong or blinn phong. the thing that makes it look waxy is a low specular power (smoothness in standard shader), causing much wider specular highlights. you can probably recreate this with the standard shader, except the global illumination provided by light probes will not be up to this level ~ i’m not sure about hdrp ssgi however, it may suffice. there’s always a possibility that the images you provided are rendered with raytracing, as none of them are interactable.
To get the smooth clean shading and soft edges you would need to create a very high resolution model in a sculpting application like Zbrush and then bake the smooth surface into a normal map and apply it to a low resolution version of the model.
A very simple, primitive way to get a translucent look is called “diffuse wrap”. you can probably find a formula for this online and incorporate it in a surface shader (built-in renderer) or shadergraph (URP).
Apart from that, there are various translucent shaders for all renderers on the asset store.
Alternatively, a “cartoon” shader might do what you want and there are various implementations of this floating around too.
Lighting Models In Unity - Jordan Stevens (jordanstevenstechart.com)
here’s an example of diffuse wrap (half -lambert) lighting.
