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Unity Toon Shader (UTS3) is a toon shader for images and video that is designed to meet the needs of creators working on cel-shaded 3DCG animations. Unlike other pre-render toon shaders, all features can be adjusted in real time on Unity, which is the greatest feature of Unity Toon Shader.
Unity Toon Shader has great power and makes a wide variety of character designs possible, from cel-shaded to light novel illustration styles.
Unity Toon Shader has the 3 basic layers of Base Color, 1st Shade Color, and 2nd Shade Color, colors and textures can also accept a wide variety of customization options, such as High Color, Rim Light, MatCap (sphere mapping), and Emissive (light emission).
What colors will you select as accent colors? The accent color is the color which is set at the opposite side of light direction.
In Unity Toon Shader, you can use 2nd shade color and Ap-RimLight as accent color. Of course, these accent colors also change dynamically to the light.
The level of gradation (feather) between colors can also be adjusted in Unity in real-time.
In animation production, color design is made for each part in each scene unit. It is common to have specialists who make these color designs. Unity Toon Shader is suitable for such pipelines.
In Animation movies, shadows are used not only to represent light directions but also to clarify shapes of characters. It’s not just shadow, but a vital part of character design.
For this purpose, Unity Toon Shader also has 2 options for creating fixed shadows necessary to the design: the Position Map, which assigns a set casting point to each shadow, and the Shading Grade Map, which can adjust shadow intensity based on the lighting. The movie above is a sample of the features of Shading Grade Map and AngelRing.
These two images are comparison between Lit Shader(Standard Shader) and Unity Toon Shader under the same lighting conditions.
Although there is a difference between Photo-realistic and Non-photo-realistic images, you can understand all surface reflections to real-time lights are seen in the same areas. It means Unity Toon Shader can be used as same as Lit Shader(Standard Shader) under various lighting conditions.
Unity Toon Shader is very useful if you want to decorate your game scene with beautiful lightings.
Finally, several techniques have been implemented to beautifully display characters in a variety of lighting environments, thanks to recent feedback from VRChat/Game users.
To install this package, follow the instructions in the Package Manager documentation.
If you installed this package, Unity Toon Shader files are installed into com.unity.toonshader folder under Packages folder in your Unity project.
To get the sample scenes of Unity Toon Shader, Install samples via Package Manager for each render pipeline. The instruction to install the samples is here.
You can learn various setting examples of Unity Toon Shader.
To learn how to use Unity Toon Shader, see Users' Manual.
Users' manual is a document with plentiful knowledge of toon style.
The iteration cycle between reading the manual and using Unity Toon Shader actually is the best way to learn the beautiful toon style.
You can open Users' Manual from the custom inspector English Manual button of Unity Toon Shader, see here.
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Requires Unity 2019.4.21f1 or higher.
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Unity Toon Shader uses a forward rendering environment. Using a linear color space is recommended. (A gamma color space can also be used, but this tends to strengthen shadow gradiation. For more details, see Linear or Gamma Workflow.)
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Unity Toon Sahder supports Legacy, Universal RP and HDRP. Please refer to the documentation of each rendering pipeline for supported platforms. However, HDRP uses stencil buffers internally, so UTS stencil effects cannot be used. Please check the Feature Model documentation for the different support status of UTS in each render pipeline.
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Due to the pandemic, we are currently unable to test on the consoles, so please bear this in mind.
The following table indicates the directory of Unity Toon Shader:
| Folder Location | Description |
|---|---|
Runtime\Shader |
Contains Unity Toon Shader files. |
Editor |
Contains Unity Toon Shader Custom Inspector and other utilities. |
Unity Toon Shader is provided under the Unity Companion License for Unity-dependent projects.
Unless expressly provided otherwise, the Software under this license is made available strictly on an “AS IS” BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. Please review the license for details on these and other terms and conditions.
Be sure to check the manual after installation.
The manual explains how to use Unity Toon Shader in detail.
Please contact us if you have any issues.
The release history of Unity Toon Shader is here.
The release history of UTS2 is here.