I’m working with ShaderForge. I trying to get a cel-shaded style, but I wanted to get specular highlights as well. It seems like it is working so far. The shader uses directional lights for the toon-shading thing, and then if it renders a point light, it only adds the spec highlights. The images have a single directional light currently, and a couple of point lights, one green, one blue(which will likely be used in game for some effects, like bullets lighting things up, explosions, etc… to go along with the cel-shading).
The shader itself allows you to use vertex colors for shading, along with a normal map(which indeed affects the cel-shading too). The only reason I cared about the normal map is because I wanted to be able to have some variety in the shading instead of having everything too smooth. In the game I would mostly just have some noisy normals as opposed to using them for real sculpts.
The first one is a closeup shot. The objects wouldn’t usually be that big, except for maybe bosses. I wanted to show it though to get an idea of what things will look like that size.
The second one is probably about the right size for things.
So, I’m looking for feedback. Does the style work? I’m going to have some alien enemies as well, some bosses, powerups, etc… Things will be moving and rotating too, so the actual shading will be more apparent in actual movement.