I Want To Pick Your Brains

Faeryl Womyn

I have had a sort of love affair with how the creators of the Borderlands game series did their textures. I know it's cel shading, but that's about all I know. I have been checking different ways in which this can be accomplished. Blender certainly has an option with the grease pencil, something Daz does not have. I just came upon an idea that might work, geo shells, only I don't know if you can applly a texture to it the same way you do skin on the base model or clothes, etc.

I know some of you use geo shells for you products and wondered if you knew how to do that above and could this really work?

 

nemesis10

I think I would start with something simplier:

1. select a character you like
2. duplicate a subset of the character's texture folder 
3. adjust a texture from that folder using your favorite image editor (they generally have some short of cartoon/sketch filter, and with some judicious contrast, something like that should be possible)
4. load your new altered textures on the character and change gloss on the skin surfaces to black....

Hylas

First of all, I don't know how to achieve that look. So if you're looking for advice you can skip this entire comment :)

I'm just here to say... I love the hand-drawn cartoon & comic look. I'm a child of the 80's and 90's and that's what I grew up with.

I haven't seen many successfull attempts with DAZ and/or Photoshop. Most of the time CGI pretending to be hand drawn looks just like that... something pretending to be something it's not.

I personally don't love how Borderlands looks but I think Breath of the Wild and Bastion/Transistor/Hades got cel shading right. I would love an additional render engine to IRAY/Filament/3DL that can do that. Or an IRAY shader system of course, but I somehow doubt that's possible, given how all IRAY toon shaders I know of just don't look that great.

Pax Asteriae

I'd also suggest modifying the texture maps (I'm pretty sure most of the detail is in that), but you could try a combination of @thenathanparable 's Visual Style and Manga Style shaders. They're both 3DL only, but if you render with VSS, then again with MSS and overlay it in a texture editor, you might get closer to that look.

They do take a bit of tinkering, but they both have good documentation.

(Disclaimer: these pictures are all from when the shaders first came out - Genesis 1 era, iirc. I've not done anything more recent because I only started using DS again last year.)

margrave

Borderlands is not cel shaded. Cel shading creates a hard shadow, not the gradients you see in images of gameplay.

There are model rips available online. Those black lines are literally just painted onto the texture maps. You could theoretically emulate it with a geoshell, since all you'd need to do is texture paint them in Blender with an alpha channel.

Faeryl Womyn

Margrave thank you, I kinda thought I would have to paint the lines on the textures, I only know how to apply textures under surfaces on the models themselves and didn't know if that was the same way to do it for geoshells.

It's those lines in particular I was interested in knowing how to do. I have seen how to video's of people who actually paint on real clothes to get the effect for cosplay.

I thought Borderlands did cel shading because I have seen it referenced quite often when people asked how it was done. I saw the same effect done in the Prince of Persia game, though the lines are not so defines, they are much lighter/thinner and more for detail.

The rest of you, thank you for you input and will consider all your suggestions.

margrave

Borderlands and Prince of Persia 2008 have a distinct aesthetic involving hand-painted texture maps, but "cel shaded" means it uses a particular kind of shading that generates hard, flat shadows, emulating animation cells from the days before digital coloring became popular. It's also called "Toon Shading" and it looks like this:

Catherine3678ab

This may [or not] be of interest for you:  https://www.daz3d.com/oso-toon-shader-for-iray

 

WendyLuvsCatz

Unreal does it too

 

 

j cade

You might also want to take a gander at https://www.daz3d.com/dotify-for-genesis-8-female for research

 

the dots are one tghing but it also has textures with likes around the lips eyelids etc.

 

it definitely would be something I'd do in blender if I were trying to emulate it though in addition to greasepencil there's more npr tricks one can do there

 

and if you look at the hair in the render of one of their other products

 

the seconn and fourth image match your example pretty decently

 

at minimum some inspo/a starting point I think

margrave

Also, don't forget about Freestyle (like I do ).

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/freestyle/introduction.html

It'll create those black lines the OP is looking for procedurally. Then she'll probably be able to bake them to a texture map

Faeryl Womyn

Catherine, I have that shader wishlisted and bookmarked...lol

Wendy I knew Unreal could do it, I just don't know if I'm up to learning yet another program, already have BforArtist and Poser 11 on my list and now have to find a 2D program, since my ver 11 Paint Shop Pro won't work in Win10, won't let me apply my serial to get it out of trial mode.

JCade that one where he colabed with Riversoft looks like the one with the option to use lines, checks  or dots is the one more closely related to what I need.

Margrave I will check into Freestyle.

Thanks to all of you, this is all very helpful.