Cell Shading

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Cell Shading

The word is "cel shading." Especially considering my longtime study of biology, I cringe every time I see someone refer to "cell shading." That mistake-term actually applied to my last animation job; I was doing medical animation which required me to create materials/shaders which evoked the appearance of cells.

At any rate, the best way right now is to have a copy of the mesh, expanded slightly along the polygon normals, flipped, and colored black. This accomplishes the black outlines; to get the stark lighting/shading you will either need to play with the ambient light or use a spherical environment map to fake it. To expand on the latter suggestion, create a texture which is white for the top two thirds and grey in the bottom third, load this image as a spherical environment map with "multiply" blending, apply it to your model as the second texture layer, and set the model to fullbright.