I’ve just seen this new Disney short: “Paperman”, which apart from being a lovely little story, has one of the most beautiful non-photorealistic CG that I’ve ever seen in film or other media. I love how they’ve manage to capture the style of a 2d cartoon drawing in 3d. I wonder how easily it’s possible to do the same in realtime in a game? This is of particular interest to me as I’m working on a game that I intend to look like a charcoal drawing in motion. (Although, not that much motion :P) I found this video on the making of paperman, and it does use a sort of drawing over 2d frames. I’d love to know how they did the lighting, which looks like hand shading.
But apart from this example, I’d like to discuss non-photorealistic rendering in games in general, particularly 3d games (with 2d it comes more down to art style, I’d argue). You see quite a lot bright cartoon games (eg Psychonauts) and there’s been a trend towards “comic book” style (eg borderlands) and there’s always cell shading too. But have you seen other styles? What’re your favourite examples? I’d love to see a game that looks like a watercolour painting. It seems to me that styles that require smoother blending and lines would be harder to achieve. What do you think?
Usually this comes down to special shaders such as pencil drawing or sketched outlines etc, to convert otherwise normal 3d stuff to look like it came from some other media. I think it’s pretty cool. Sometimes it gets overused like all the sketch type of games with pencil-on-paper style.
