Cell Shading : Amiga's next holy grail?

[yssing]

Way to cool :-)
Looks great...

[filson]

Note that a 600Mhz PPC G3 and ATI Radeon 9100 (or even SIS Xabre) should have enough 3D power to blow away the Nintendo’s Game Cube out of the water.

plz note that any game console is tuned for games.
PPC/PC's are not. Just look at the X-Box. A GeForce 2 MX with a very serious attitude. Definitely not what I got out of my PC version.  :-D

[Calen]

I have played the new Cell shaded Zelda and to be honest it looks nice, almost like taking control of a cartoon world, but having said that  its all new, a novelty that will probably soon fade.

I got to play 2 big titles on the GC the past week, StarFox and the new Zelda, i know which one had me in awe over its lovely gfx and there was no cell shading to be seen ;-)

[KingTutt]

As I mentioned before, cel shading could be treated as a nice gap filler technology until we can make fully rendered 3D games, without breaking the bank(hence amiga's need for pc ports). Just nice to see there are wonderful alternatives out there, that do not require a whole render farm to run.

Again, I can't stress enough how much harder it is to do an original fully fledged 3D game that can hold its own against say..Half-Life 2, as opposed to some amiga developers having a little fun with cel-shading and still putting together a respectable title.

Anyone up for a Lotus sequel ala Auto Modelista?

[alx]

Definitely looks interesting, and the results look brilliant (they look very similar to "real" animations - then you consider that it's being done real time :-o )

That said, it's still 3D, just looking different - I've no idea how 2D games could convert easily to it.  And it doesn't look as if it'd be easier/less CPU intensive than "traditional" 3D with normal lighting.

[Karlos]

Without denigrating the work, I don't see anything special to it technologically speaking. To me it just looks like a perfectly normal 3D engine, just without the usual style of lighting and choice of textures. Use simple (read flat colour) texture maps with thick black borders, wrapped around your ususal poly models. Go for minimal vertex shading, maybe just a few highlights.

If anything, I'd guess the lighting model may be simpler than a standard vertex-normal based OpenGL approach so it might be even faster than 'realistic' looking stuff.

Still, it looks cool :-)

[KingTutt]

Eh Karlos, yes both use 3D models. But using flat color texture maps are going to be a little easier to render on a A1-SE@G3-600Mhz than say C&C:Generals, no? Which is my point all along.

[jeffimix]

For those of who have Halflife and don't know what cell shading is... Download the 'mod' buzzybots. Not many people play it but its absolutely beautiful cell shading. It takes a lot less work too for the people who make it. Cell shading (IMHO) is faster than 3D because you can get away with stylized 'cartoony' stuff, people don't scream for that high polygon count realism. Cell shading, I think, is absolutely wonderful.  I just like it. (ofc I like how games on the SNES look too)

[Hammer]

samdu wrote:
Cel Shading is a fad. Trust me. By the time our new machines are in enough people's hands to matter, the fad will have passed.

Are you sure? IF there’s a market for anime/manga type presentations I’m sure Cel Shading type titles will exist.  

[KingTutt]

I wonder if a proper and tactful implementation of cel-shading in amiga classic remakes ie Rickdangerous or Superfrog, could herald a revival of interest in ol skool type gaming of past gaming hits.