UE4 Tutorial: Three-Tone Toon Shader

How to make a flexible and high-performing three-tone toon shader using post-processing. Special thanks to David Lancaster for the original method. Topics covered: Toon shaders, material graphs, post-processing.
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[@drag0nmind]

Thank you very much for this! I've been wondering on how to set up something like a 7-tone shader and this will be a perfect base to work from!

[@captainbreadbeard9870]

Me: "I'm in need of a toon shader. I'll look it up on KZbin. Oh! here's a nice looking one, and only 15 minutes long!" this tutorial: "Go follow a different 18-minute tutorial first." Me: "Okay. I guess I can do that." the other tutorial: "Go follow an hour-long Epic livestream first." Me: "...." EDIT: After having just done all this, I can say that it's worth it. But, just so you know.

[@captainbreadbeard9870]

@Tibor Hornok kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYLaYnaCZd2MeKc - That's the Epic Games Livestream that the rest of the tutorial is based on. I didn't watch the entire thing, I just hopped around looking for the info I needed. kzbin.info/www/bejne/Zoalf4ukmrFkpdE - That's the first Toon Shader tutorial that this video builds off of. I needed info from both of these to understand this video.

[@akoshpoemandres8815]

literally on the same rabbit hole adventure right now haha

[@Ali107]

8:55 *Welcome to the Shadow Realm Jimbo!*

[@geoffrey3668]

Thanks for sharing!

[@Pac-bq2sn]

Exactly what I needed bro haha 💞

[@mattkaiser8984]

How’s Thug Mansion?

[@Junqers]

Thank you! :D

[@KayPhantomville]

May I say that I love you for doing this?

[@richardtoth7240]

Crazy good tutorial! Do you have a patreon or something too? would like to support the channel to have more videos :)

[@underscore00]

Thanks! :) There are support links in the description

[@IchigoDreyar]

very nice

[@ty_teynium]

Very much awesome! Also could you revisit the compass tutorial? I have a respawn system setup and using your compass whenever I respawn the compass stays on the previous character that died and it doesn't update with the current character I play after the respawn.

[@Zanden-Xade]

id like to see how to do your lines

[@OiItsPhantom]

Hey I just followed the tutorial and was wondering if your willing to help me add one specific extra thing to it as ive got no idea how id implement it. Is there a way to make it so if my player is in pitch black he has a white outline around him? Basically the normal toon outline but changed to white when in the dark. Would you be willing to get in a call with me over discord or something to chat?

[@dIancaster]

Yeah, sure. David Lancaster#2472.

[@CultivationPath]

i have all the same but mine doesn't look like that : ( when i link the ceil into the emissive color , i get only whites, no black. and when i link the lerp into emissive color, i just don't get shadows. i'm using the same default values of this video and i don't have anything fancy on my scene. any idea on what may be?

[@dIancaster]

Yeah, I can help you through that. No luck since then, I imagine?

[@MizphitReign]

Curious, does this help gpu or cpu usage? love this style of graphics, BotW, Genshin impact style. Working on something for the Quest and don't want to use this if it adds to the processing power.

[@underscore00]

Everything in a material graph is run on the gpu. That said, I still like to keep material instructions under 125 for VR, just to be sure. Something else to keep in mind: You might find it difficult to recreate this in VR if you're using forward rendering. The forward renderer can't call on any scene buffers (such as BaseColor in the video) so you'll need a workaround.

[@tanjiro6641]

Hey I’m working on a the flash game can you work on a counter attack? Or maybe a slowed world

[@tanjiro6641]

@D.A. Botos It’s a game about the flash

[@rafaelocariz1384]

First of all: great video, I really enjoyed learning the line of thought behind the toon shader. But there is something I absolutely didn't like in your solution: this is a post-processing stuff. You are making sure I have a mandatory layer of overdraw over my entire frame, every frame. Sometimes we don't have the performance budget to it. I will appreciate it if you can release a video building an actual material that I can use with my meshes to avoid this overdraw

[@xweert711]

Wouldn't this be cheaper and less tedious, though? If you make every single model have a very advanced shader like this, not only would that be very annoying to implement for every single art asset, but it would also be a lot more expensive than just simply having one overdraw. You are going to have to deal with this no matter what unless you just completely opt to not have Post Processing.

[@rafaelocariz1384]

@@xweert711 you don't need to implement a material for every single asset, you can have a base material that handles toon shading and lighting and use a variant of it for your assets, changing only the maps (textures) you want This shader is also terrible at handling indirect lighting, it makes your assets look like they have some unwanted glows. Also, you already have other mandatory overdraw in your project, like UI, particles, any sort of transparency, foliage, etc. You can't just add one more and call it cheaper because is a fast shader to write, this is no solution for a shipping product. At best this is a prototype level solution to do some feasibility evaluation on an idea

[@xweert711]

@@rafaelocariz1384 That's what I mean. Instead of having one overdraw by adding a Post Process, you are instead adding a bunch more shader instructions to every single material for every single asset in your game. Even if they all have the same instructions, you are still adding more parameters to every single asset in the game and that is eventually going to be a lot more taxing than a post process. In your situation if you are adamant about not having Post Processing, you should just tailor each mesh to look stylized and be careful with your lighting, instead of having every single mesh have a complex shader

[@rafaelocariz1384]

@@xweert711 not exactly truth. Writing proper toon shading in UE is fighting against how UE works to begin with, and that being said, it is a bad thing. With toon shading you greatly simplify light calculations, making your process lighter than before (sometimes with an order or two of magnitude more performance). With PP, you do all expensive complex light calculations first, to then filter it out from your frame buffer because you want a simpler aesthetic. Regarding your other solution, of having assets that already look very close to what you want, that is unfeasible in a content driven project, or for a game with a huge amount of content. Well, this solution being shown as the best possible in UE only shows how the engine is not suitable as is for this kind of project. That's a reason why studios customize the engine a lot, to make it suitable to their needs

[@xweert711]

@@rafaelocariz1384 The solution you are trying to propose is literally what I'm suggesting, but with more steps involved. So now I'm just confused. It's unfeasible to make every imported asset be created in a stylized way, but it's not unfeasible to do literally that, but also make every single material have a more expensive material? Which means doing more work? .. Huh? Whatever you're asking for, man, as you've said yourself, UE4 just might not be the right engine for it. Good luck on your hunt for a solution, though, regardless

[@raktimjs]

The tutorial for Outline_PP???

[@karthikeyas5753]

Ayyyy first here

[@DrPickle011]

damnit

[@karthikeyas5753]

@@DrPickle011 Lmao

[@VSimCardV]

A follow-up of the video that got 126k views?!

[@adils4604]

Is this a supplement to your previous cel shade post process tutorial?

[@underscore00]

Kind of, yeah. It's another exploration of toon shaded materials and uses my original video as a base. The current top commenter missed this or didn't want to learn or something lol