thegreatbeyond

I think he means "A lot bit of a lot of topics".

Yus indeedy!

Here's a pick from Jet Set Radio Future. That looks like the backside of Corn to me. Wh00.

And here's the side, mwehee. I'll just stop now. ^^;

Synchro wrote: I would love to see a cel shaded Sonic game... that would be friggin' sw33t...

yea it would...we'll hafta run that by SEGA sometime.^_^

But there is a cell-shaded Sonic game - Sonic Shuffle.

never heard of it. whats it for? saturn?

No. Dreamcast. It's a puzzle game.

I thought it was a mario party type game?

It is. But I called it a puzzle game for lack of a better phrase. ^^;;

Well, Mario Party isn't really a puzzle game. It's more of a party game, hence its title.

0.0;; Okay, now I'm confused.

Well, is Sonic Shuffle a puzzle game, a party game, or a party game which involves puzzles?

..For once, in my WHOLE life, I am speechless on the subject.

Cel shading is just slightly harder to program than normal shading. The normal way to draw things is to interpolate colors smoothly, for smooth shading. Graphics cards do this pretty easily. Cel shading can take just a little bit of extra programming, since instead of just calculating colors and blending them smoothly, you calculate one dimensional texture coordinates, and blend these texture coordinates smoothly. The one dimensional texture contains the color gradient. If the one dimensional texture was just a smooth color gradient, the result would look a lot like normal shading. But instead, the one dimensional texture has those color blocks. So the colors kind of jump over thresholds as going from light to dark.

Doing this one dimensional texture lookup generally takes an extra step, since first the texture coordinate values need to be calculated, and then those are used as an index into the texture. Modern videocards can handle this better, what with programmable fragment shaders.

And with normal shading, you need to make good looking textures. With cel shading, the coloring is much more flat, so focus to details might be slightly less important (or maybe not, Cel shaded animation can still be detailed), but then you also need to set up the one dimensional textures and texture coordinates so everything looks nice and that could be a little extra work.

Actually, they might be able to use three dimensional textures for cel shading now...take the three primary colors, red, green, and blue, and map them into a three dimensional texture to get the desired cel color...not sure about this, but I think it makes sense. No idea how it is done in games currently, the only examples I've seen use one dimensional textures but they could make things difficult if using lots of colors and lighting effects.

I'm trying to figure out the purpose of Vorpy's post there? Good explanation, but did anyone ask for one? Or did I just miss something?