Building Alliance - Week 9:

In this blog I will be looking at researching how to create a cel shaded look in unreal engine and what the best way to do it is. 
 
Research:

I looked at ways that it was possible to be able to create a cel shaded look and if it was possible to create it in unreal engine. There are ways to do it in blender however we were concerned that it wouldn't transfer over to unreal so I was tasked with looking at how it is made and what would be the best way to create it. Unreal uses nodes to be able to create textures and shaders which is what we will be using to create our shaders for the specific look we are going for.


How To Make Cel Shading In Unreal Engine 5, 2024. [Youtube] Unreal University, 1 May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjtubyOUTJg [Accessed 21 November 2024]


I looked at the video and looked at what the best way to create the shader would be and the first video I looked at said that it would be best to create it as a postprocessing shader which you would have your base textures and then it adds the shader over the top to create the cel shaded look.

I looked into if it was possible to be able to take cel shaders creating in blender and apply them to a model in unreal engine 5 however it isn't possible because of the differences in how they are created.



Nyxxxa, 2021. Is there a way to preview UE4/UE5 shader effects in Blender?  [online]. Reddit: Unreal Engine. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/pguovq/is_there_a_way_to_preview_ue4ue5_shader_effects/ [Accessed 25 November 2024]



Autodesk, N/A. Toon Shader: Bring retro 2D style to 3D computer graphics [online]. Autodesk: Solutions. Available at: https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/toon-shader#:~:text=Toon%20shading%20uses%20flat%20shade,three%20tones%20to%20its%20shading. [Accessed 25 November 2024]

I looked for the difference between Cel Shading and Toon Shading as I had seen that it was quite easy to use toon shaders in maya so I wondered if it was similar to the style that we were going for so that we could create it in maya and then transfer over however that created the same issue as creating the textures in blender first so I decided to stick to researching about creating the shaders in unreal instead.



How to Make Toon Outlines, 2022. [Youtube] Matt Aspland, 17 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZH4jCO4ZM [Accessed 21 November 2024].

Looking through the video on creating outlines it breaks it down into different sections such as creating the nodes to detect the edges and then creating one for the actual outline so that it creates the outline in the correct areas depending on where the light source is. 

Creating Textures in Unreal:


This is the nodes that I created using the tutorial for cel-shading. There were a lot of different nodes to be able to create the shader, I found that I ran into a few issues with the tutorial and I found that my first issue was that I didn't change on of the settings for one of the nodes. However the second issue that I had was that the shader made the box I was using for a test go black. I needed to go back through the process and double check where I made a mistake and how it needs fixes.

Meeting:

We decided that we didn't need to have a meeting this week as we have the tasks that we need to do already set for the week for us to complete for next weeks lesson. My tasks are to work on the cel shaded look in unreal and to finish the pellets.