Unreal Engine Best Cel shading approach in Unreal Engine?

[TransformDev]

Hi,

I'm making a game running currently on UE5.4, for quite a bit I've been researching versatile solutions to a stylized Cel-shaded look in the engine.
So far, I've tried out a couple plugins and stuck around with Stylized Rendering System (Cel-Shader) by yeaulianStore.
It gets the job done for now, but it's got some limitations, mostly in terms of applying the final color, since it's a post-process effect, it creates limited slots with render stencils, requires global setup and doesn't allow for per-object settings of shading, so I cannot mix soft and hard shaded elements. That's a bummer, since I'm looking to create separate styles for skin and hair to achieve anime look.

I don't want to modify the engine, while that's one solution, I want to try out something that doesn't require me to compile from source.

One thing I've researched so far are SceneViewExtensions, but they also operate on Post-Processing, which is problematic as mentioned above.

Is there a simpler way to do it? Am I missing something?

Cheers~!

 

[Winterfire]

If you're trying to get an anime look, there's much more involved than the right shader.
You can watch this video:

You must be registered to see the links

to get quite some good insight.
But tldr from what I can remember from it: Texture work (including "baking" the shading) in them is one of the major steps.

 

[TransformDev]

If you're trying to get an anime look, there's much more involved than the right shader.
You can watch this video:

You must be registered to see the links

to get quite some good insight.
But tldr from what I can remember from it: Texture work (including "baking" the shading) in them is one of the major steps.

Thanks for the tip, I've seen this talk. I've got asset preparation covered for the most part, I'll try to see about the shadows getting baked into the texture, this could help with some edge cases.
The case for my game is a little peculiar since it takes place indoors, with no clear directional light that helps to sell the cel-shading and is distributed between a couple static light sources. This creates an imbalance because the cel-shaded light creates a lot of ugly "shadow islands", to mitigate this, I'm resorting to faking some of the lighting, but I feel like that's the end of the post-process-based shading capabilities. That's why I'm looking for a way to maybe achieve this through a more customized shading model