Hello, I’d like to ask a question and also introduce myself. I’ve been visiting this site on and off over the last couple of years and the Mac limitation has kept me from purchasing. Now I’ve downloaded the demo and I’m extremely impressed by it. I come from a Torque background having struggled with the development of Nuclear Nightmare which is now frozen. I see a lot of familiar people of the forums by the way.
I’ll be starting a small custom game project for a client in a few days and I’m thinking of using Unity. However, we’d like to use cell shading as the graphical style and would like to know how much effort is needed to accomplish this. I’m no programming expert and if needed I’ll have to contract someone but I’d first like to know how feasible it is and what it takes. Thanks.
Hi Nick, and welcome! It’s easy to do cel-shading in Unity. In fact the Unity Indie comes with a Toonshading package that you can include when creating a new project, or import into an existing one. The package includes four shaders and an example cubemap for the cel-shaded look, and an example scene with some pre-setup spheres showing off the differences in the shaders.
To take a look, just create a new project and make sure the “Toonshading” package checkbox is enabled. You’ll be good to go
Coming from Torque, you’re in for a shock-- cell shading is INCREDIBLY easy. In fact to be totally, utterly cliche, it’s as “easy as 1 2 3” (hehe, ugh)
When you create a new project, in the project wizard, you will see “Import the following packages.” Just check the box next to Toonshading.UnityPackage and press create new project complete with toonshading functionality.
Take a mesh, in this case let’s create a couple of cubes with GameObject > Create Other > Cube and put them one in front of the other, so you can really see the effect.
In the project pane, open the Toonshading folder, and drag “Toony–Basic Outline” on to the cubes. Or try any of the other settings. If you look in the inspector, you can see and set the many properties needed to further customize your toonshader per your needs.
Like a lot of things with Unity, toonshading is so much easier than in other engines.
No wonder I couldn’t find anything in the forums. I was mistakenly typing it “cell”! Sorry about that and thank you for the realy fast and insightful reply. Unity amazes me every day!
