Question about normal maps.....

[thatdudeagain]

I have been playing Valkyria Chronicles, which is a very beautiful game.....but something stuck out at me that is in most games like this(ie - cell shaded).

The Textures are very flat. For instance, the rope texture around the tank looks like its blended in with the turret, not actually rapped around it... Games that use Cell shading or similar methods always fall prey to this flatness.

My question is, can you use normal maps, and actually cell shade the normal, as I really don't know if I've seen a method like that before? Also, what about streaming in a cell shade with high res normals? I think that cell shading applied to texture work like that in Gears or Uncharted, would bring us closer to that Cartoon or painted look......

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes. The shading is applied to the lighting as a post effect (or shader effect achieving the same thing). If you render a sphere with bumps, you can apply the Valkyria Chronicles shading effect to the rendered image to 'pencil in' the shaded areas.

 

[thatdudeagain]

Yes. The shading is applied to the lighting as a post effect (or shader effect achieving the same thing). If you render a sphere with bumps, you can apply the Valkyria Chronicles shading effect to the rendered image to 'pencil in' the shaded areas.

How come no games use this? Is it cost heavy? I always wonder why Cell shading has to suffer with no depth to the image....

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think it'll be an artist's choice. There may be technical limits like RAM, depending on the rest of the game requirements. Taking VC as an example, perhaps they are RAM limited so don't have room for normal maps? I think that's unlikely though. Normal maps would have to be quite plain and undetailed for the shading effect to look clean and not noisy, and also if they're trying to match the anime look which doesn't (AFAIK, not watching anime!) detail in extra lumps and bumps then they'd want to steer clear of adding extra detail. Looking at Naruto, they've done a stella job of capturing the cartoon look. Adding detail would have gone against the style. Whereas SF4 looks like it is using normal maps (from a cursory glance at these stills). Edit : Then again they may well just be painted on details, looking at a low quality gameplay vid!

 

[fehu]

the new prince of persia must be using both

 

[corysama]

There are games that use normal maps while doing cell shading, but it is usually difficult to tell unless you are specifically looking for it. Cartoon style usually involves very smooth shapes, so the bumps tend to be pretty limited. On top of that, the effects of the bumps on cell shading are not nearly as obvious as they are when doing traditional phong shading.