How do you achieve this style?

>>567191
The style is called NPR or "non-photorealistic", that's the sort of catchall term for hand painted textures, toon shaders, toon shaders tweaked with hand painted details, etc

>>567226
>toon shaders, toon shaders tweaked with hand painted details, etc
>toon
is it so difficult to write cartoon..?

>>567229
That's just the common terminology used. Noone says "cartoon shader".
Try not being such a fucking dork all your life.

>>567191
It comes down to how you handle the typical three key factors: textures, geometry (the other kind of geometry), and lighting.

On the texturing front, you need a good illustrator. Someone that can actually draw out the kind of scenes you want before any game assets get made. This is a VERY different kind of job from a concept artist, and you are NOT hiring a concept artist. Best case scenario, you end up using some of the illustrations directly in your texturing, but don't count on it.

Before hiring an illustrator, consider geometry. I mean grade school geometry here. If you can't break down the shapes of the illustration into a mental map of of 3 dimensional primitives (and I do mean THREE dimensional), then you might want to reconsider the overall style. Not all styles translate well into a 3D real time game, and some compromises will need to be made. The LoL/DotA/WoW look has caught on for a reason, it translates from 2d to 3d well, and back again, and there's a reason why more games don't look like Dr. Seuss, Roger Hargreaves, or for that matter Robert Crumb - these styles don't lend themselves to easy geometric breakdowns. Understanding the roles of geometry in this aspect is crucial to picking the right illustrations.

There's a second role basic geometry plays in this style: keeping your in-game shapes simple. Notice how almost everything in RiME is a basic primitive. They get a lot of millage out of boxes and cylinders. Rock surfaces are kept as planar (flat) as possible. This holds true for their organic shapes as well. Not only will this help maintain the sort of hard borders between objects found in many illustrations, but the surfaces will be much much easier to texture and light properly, as well as generate collision data. Hard borders doesn't necessarily mean hard edges, you want your objects to go 'plane -> chamfer -> plane -> chamfer'. Get out your 3D program's bevel/chamfer tool and use it on some primitives. You'll see what I mean.

>>567244
Finally, lighting. I don't have a lot of information on this, it's a little out of my wheelhouse, but I can tell you how to get started. RiME uses "simplified" lighting. Every 3D program has some variant of this (Ink and Paint in 3ds Max, and Ramp Shading in Blender and Maya). Both Unity and Unreal 4 have ways of accomplishing this too. The idea is to take information from light sources and cast shadows, and reduce things to simply "Lit or unlit" based on how much light the object is receiving. This is by a wide margin one of the hardest thing to get right, and 3D artists have driven themselves mad trying to get simplified lighting to look not-shitty. The things Arc System Works did for Guilty Gear Xrd to get the lighting to look good involve some truly next level thinking, none of which is needed to get something on par with RiME but is worth looking at anyway.

>>567229
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading
"Cel shading or toon shading..."
>toon shading

>google search 'cartoon shading'
>auto searches for 'toon shading' because 'cartoon shading' isn't a term used in 3D terminology

Toonshaders ALWAYS look horrible on human models. No exception.

The software can't figure out where to emphasize or use only very little light and/or shadows. The artist can.
100% computed cellfaggotry looks horrible.

>>567244
>>567245
Thank you for a detailed breakdown.

I'm actually wondering something - can this also be considered a cel-shaded game? Is Team Fortress 2 cel-shaded, then? Borderlands 2?

I'm asking this because I realized that people often call everything with a look similar to this a "cel-shaded" game, but actually, afaik, cel-shaded and hand-painted/"cartoony" style are not the same things. And if you read a bit about RiME on the internet, you'll see that a lot of people call it a cel-shaded game.

And one more thing - what programs would I have to use to achieve this effect? How should I approach this? Would I have to draw textures in PS, or could I use Substance Painter for that, too?

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>>567255
>cel-shaded and hand-painted/"cartoony" style are not the same things

You're right, they're not the same thing.

The domain of cel-shading is usually limited to lighting/shadows (discussed above) and outline rendering (which Borderlands and Okami has, and RiME doesn't as far as I've noticed). Borderlands has outlines, but not simplified lighting. Does that mean it's still "cel-shaded"?

I don't like to use the term 'cel-shading' because it's not very precise and seems to mean different things to different people. I prefer to talk about lighting/shadows, and outlining and leave labels out of it.

And cel-shading has nothing to do with what you've got going on in terms of modeling and texturing, which can make even a game with standard lighting look cartoon style. You can turn off the outlines in Borderlands, and it'll look a bit weird, but it will still look somewhat cartoony without any "cel-shading" features at all (pic related). So that's a huge thing to consider.

>what programs would I have to use to achieve this effect? How should I approach this?

You should approach this by not asking what programs to use.

You need a bog standard grounding in modeling and texturing (in any application), and a firm grasp of the interplay between 2D and 3D. That doesn't mean you need to be a good 2D traditional artist (but it helps) it means you need to at least know how it works at a theoretical level (perspective, in particular).

Again, focus on mentally mapping out a 2D illustration in terms of 3D primitives (boxes, cylinders, cones). After that, you can start building the scenes in your 3D program, and cutting up the illustration for texture data. Yes, it will look like ass, but it'll give you an idea of where to go from there.

>>567262
This. The labels are not very well defined and are only making people confused.
Also, OP, art styles aren't really "called" anything. They're different for every piece of media and there aren't really categories of art styles to choose from. An art style ist just the guideline for artists to work after and can be anything really. Instead of thinking like that, try to look at the image and break it down: is it photo realistic or stylized? If stylized, are there outlines, are the textures painted by hand or are they made out of photos? What happens when light hits an object, is it realistically shaded or is it simplified? Are there even shadows? Are there reflections? What are the proportions like, are they exaggerated or realistic? Is there a limited color palette? Are there any post processing filters you can spot (sharpening, grain, color grading etc)?

I've seen people using Substance Designer for these kinds of textures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk8H4moumZo

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Working on something similar.

In RiME, they went with stylized textures and geometry, but realistic lighting (no cel shading, but a soft gradient instead. Also light bounce, etc).

But the most characteristic aspect of this style is the softness of the foliage, imo. You achieve that by modifying the vertex normals direction of the mesh, so that the grass doesn't get shadowed, and so that tree in the background is shaded like a sphere, instead of a bunch of planes thrown together.

Also, in RiME, characters and some other important objects have some emissive value, so that they can easily be seen even in the dark.

Other than that, it's all good color theory and art direction.

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>>567251
One of the big issues is that the way characters are deliberately hand-shaded in cartoons/anime doesn't translate to simple generated effects. For example, Guilty Gear was mentioned here, and one of the things it did right was use different overlapped models for the character and the shading, so that shading was drawn based on a simplified figure that produced clean lines that didn't necessarily follow the contour of every single polygon. This lets you use very sharp and clean lines without having the shading look noisy and broken up.
Another thing they implemented on the animation side is to make the movements look very "staggered", as 2D sprites would, as they usually lack any kind of animation blending and have very few frames due to needing to be drawn by hand. Part of the illusion then is making the characters move in the same sharp and precise ways where there are no wasted frames.

>>567229
>being this autistic

>>567357
>can't into english
>has to omit 3 letters because hurr durr durr

>>567360
but the name of the shader is "toon", not "cartoon".
Its an abbreviation of cartoon, but thats not the word you use.
>>cant into english
>dont know what context is
>misuses words because "if its longer must be better xD"
poor sage

>>567364
>blames muh context for continual retardation

>>567370
Holy shit what's you're problem? It's been called toon shading for decades. No one thinks you're smart because you point out that three letters are missing.

>>567373
its cartoon, not toon. Just because something has been x for y amount of time doesnt mean that it should continue. See countless examples in history

>>567374
Please stop, nobody cares, languages change and evolve, it is unimportant anyway.

>>567376
it is important, as toon isnt a word

>>567374
>>567377
>>567370
No, you absolute retard. The word used for this specific kind of shading is toon, not cartoon.
Just as saying "celuloid shading" is wrong, its cel shading.
Stop embarrasing yourself, toon is as much of a word as Gooch or Phong. Not that I expect you to know what those are.

>>567378
> The word used for this specific kind of shading is toon, not cartoon.
kid, that isnt a word at all. Its like claiming that mttwe9f0 is a word. It simply is not. Use the actual word ffs, something that IS an actual word.

Are you pretending to be retarded?

>>567379
>its like claiming mmtwe9f0 is a word
well, is it? do people use that word to refer to a kind of shading? thought so.
you go on and use "cartoon shading", or even better, "celluloid shading" instead of celshading, and I'll continue to laugh at your retarded ass that thinks that more syllabus means hes more smarterer thant the other kids.
youll get out of highschool someday.

>>567383
at least I'll have passed English

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4channing it up

>>567391
>non sequitor

>>567379
>>567377
Jesus fucking Christ. Languages evolve you dense motherfucker. When I studied linguistics a couple of years back, there were nothing that annoyed my professors more than pseudo intellectual cunts like you who couldn't grasp that languages aren't set in stone for all eternity. Go back to 9gag and look at memes about how bad fidget spinners are, you insufferable idiot.
Do you walk up to auto repair shops complaining they left "-mobile" out of their signs too?

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>>567383
>Caring this much about abbreviations.

/3/ - Linguistics and Mental Illness

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>>567433
>calling car services auto repair shops

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>>567191
From what i can see:
>PBR shading, soft shadows, generally more rough/less specular than in realistic materials for more "clay like" appearence
>Stylized textures/sculpts
>In this picture an orange lightsource, probably from a setting sun
>Ambient light, which is why the shadowed part of the rock is tinted blue form the sea and sky
>Lightbaking or reflection/lightprobes, you can see that the rock also reflects on itself and from the grass tinting it a bit yellow/orange inwards
>Custom vertex normals for foliage like grass and leafs for "smooth" foliage shadowing
>Basic screen shaders like antialiasing, vignette and all that crap
>Well picked colorpalettes

>>567378
Why don't you just stop feeding it? Jesus Christ...

>>567229
Does that look like a fucking cartoon to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon

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>>567457
>calling motorized rollingham hospice and jams a car services

>>567229
It's in built in Unity.
But thanks for /a/ you can find tutorials for every engine which in it's possible how to write one.

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>>567229
>cartoon shader

>>567321
Why the fuck do they never gove outlines to backgrounds. Every single fucking time. It looks so much better with outlined scenery and works way better. A fuckton of video games have this problem.

>>567377

You're a fucking toon.