Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

This is refereed to as Stylized Rendering is well supported by modern engines quite easily. Usually you just drop in plugin and you get stylized version of the game:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Resources/Showcases/Styl...

View on HN

It really depends on what style you want to achieve but it can get quite hairy pretty fast.

Non-photorealistic rendering is actually a whole (fascinating) academic field in itself.

Since you have conflicting goals (temporal coherence, spatial coherence, "flatness", relatively constant stroke/feature size, ...) it's full of interesting tradeoffs and techniques.

Even simple things like beautiful real-time stylized outlining can be really hard if you are picky about the result.

That might be what Unreal Engine refers to it as, but in academia it's referred to as NPR Rendering - Non-Photo-Realistic Rendering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photorealistic_rendering

For anime style you'll need a little more than just a few shaders. The models themselves need to be distortable and perspective-dependent.

I know very little about this field - why would a model need to be distorted to give an anime look? (Also, what does perspective-dependent mean in this context?)

Re: perspective-dependence: I'm assuming they meant that in actually hand-drawn anime, things like hairstyles or eyes are not realistic because they switch shapes and locations depending on the perspective (like, both eyes always visible even when almost-sideways, or hair spikes switching from left to right when the character turns, etc).

Good, and incredible impressive, examples are recent entries into the Guilty Gear series, such as Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY1RpK1vbTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z5-97rfHEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHp3fmDypg0

One early example in the first video is the shell casing, which is replaced with a model that has some motion blur-like extensions.

Here’s a short pdf breakdown of the shading tricks used in this game:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ltkinwnmmzurjw/GuilltyGearXrd_sha...

Thanks! For anyone interested, I found a paper on the topic (pdf):

"View-dependent geometry" [Paul Rademacher, 1999]

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs597b/p...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com