I’m trying to figure out what the trick is to get that cartoon effect like in Super Street Fighter (the new one) and borderlands/red steel 2 … ??? Is it in the shaders?? and if so what is the best method to get that look in your game?
Any chance you can post a link to screenshots or videos of the game (and explain exactly what effect you want to create)? It’s likely that some people who might be able to help will not have played the game.
i figured out how to do the black outline with the unity toon shader… but then for textures should i make thm bright solid colors to get more of a cartoon look…
http://purenintendo.com/2010/03/04/new-red-steel-2-screens/
but i wanna accomplish more of a
cartoon look like this
…
so i think the unity toon shader will work with some tweaks and just do the textures brighter then?
Toon shaders typically >reduce colors< - to 2,3,4 or 5 colors tops.
The trick is the algorithm used to posterize / reduce the colors across the surface of your models.
I have Borderlands, haven’t played it in a while so I may be forgetting something if it’s more than just toon shaded??
-Will
The first link appears to be using bright and similarly colored textures. Also, the detail is very simple and defined. Throw on an outline, do some tweaking, and you’re good.
The second link will require an awesome modeler/texturer. Something of that quality will most surely cost you around $1,000 per model from a free-lancer. SF4 doesn’t appear to be using a toon-shader. It just has beautiful almost-handpainted and textures.
Constrained color palette
Diffuse textures with no details
Toon shading
High-key lighting
Comic styling for clothes and hair
I am currently working on an iPhone project and also wanted the game to look cartoony. Since the Toon shader was not available on the iPhone, I decided to re-do the textures in the game to make them appear cartoony. As mentioned above, reduce color variation, and use THICK black lines along the edges of your objects. Also use THICK black lines as much as possible on your textures/images.
Simple colors and thick lines should help 
Not sure if this is interesting to you, but it’s got a nice breakdown of the technique used to accomplish the cartoony look of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf
Wouldn’t it be a combination of painted textures and lighting?
I’m trying to look into the Borderlands look for Unity too, and Material-wise it’s:
Blackoutline.
Color texture with lines painted in.
Normal map. (Basic, facilitates the color map rather than leading)
Spec map.
Glow map.
A lot of it has to do with how you paint the textures… my issue is just developing the SHADER to allow me to do this. (Not a coder so experimentation is proving fruitless)