Cell Shading Portal- all you could want to know about Cell Shading

WHow it Works (Cont')...hat

Silhouette Lining is one of the most effective techniques for Cel-shading, and it closely resembles hand drawn comic book styles. Here's a picture of one of my favorite comic-book heroes.

This picture contains many good examples of Silhouette lining, look closely at the black lines streaking the man's blue shirt, and the lines defining the muscles in Superman's legs. When comic book artists draw, their art style is usually characterized by solid colors inked in between thick, solid, black lines. this effect is what silhouette lining attempts to replicate. though they're not really, "silhouette lines" the word is a good way of describing this process. Some people refer to these as "outlines" or "Highlighting" outlining is probably a better term, but whatever! who decided a quadruped with four stomachs that chews cud would be called a "Cow"? I rest my case...

This process is usually determined by drawing a black edge any time a front-facing polygon and a back-facing polygon share a same edge. This process is not nearly as difficult as Cel-lighting, but nevertheless, refer to Sami Hamlaoui's walkthrough under "Making a lighting engine" for the specifics of this process.

Silhouette lighting tends to generate more exaggerated caricatures than just cel-lighting, A good example is the game Viewtifull Joe, which uses this process extensively-

Notice the lining on Viewtifull Joe's legs? Heck, his entire body is outlined! Also notice the lines on silvia to generate the illusion of hair. Keep in mind this is all generated in real time, in order to get those lines, the character modelers had to put indents in the model's wireframe in order to get the graphics engine to draw those lines!

Don't forget, cel-shading is a generic term for rendering objects to look like cartoons, cel-lighting and silhouette lining are just the most popular forms of cel-shading, not the only ones. also keep in mind, that you can have a cel-shaded game without silhouette lining, but you can't have cel-shading without Cel-lighting! The game Zelda: Windwaker relied heavily on cel-lighting and used almost no outlining what so ever!

In order to get such a fantastic cel-lighting effect, Nintendo made sure their character models had as round objects as possible. Links hair is almost completely spherical in some parts! That's the benefit of cel-shading! when your graphics engine doesn't have to spend so much memory generating textures, it allows you to have character models with polygon counts off the charts! many times this is needed in order to put all those little indents in the wire frame for silhouette lining. Cel-lighting also looks more effective when you are lighting extremely spherical objects. Large, flat, objects don't tend to look as good, but silhouette lining helps to minimalize that problem!

Well, That's my article! I hope it helped explain a few things, if it didn't, please feel free to e-mail me:

jaw048000@utdallas.edu

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