Our GDW game in its current state doesn't look as good as it should. After looking at the current state of our game, aesthetically, it needs improving. Due to the cartoon art style our artists already took inspiration from, our game seems perfectly suited for a toon shader.
In our research we looked at different games that apply toon shaders to see the variety of toon shaders currently being used. We looked at games such as Champions Online (screenshots), the Borderlands Series (screenshots), Dragon Ball Z Budokai Series (screenshots), and then we stumbled upon the game Killer is Dead, set to release in summer 2013. The aesthetic of this game is highly stylized and if I had to identify to shaders being used I'd say it was a toon shader and a bloom shader. We hope to achieve a similar effect in our game.
Killer is Dead Debut Gameplay Trailer - Looks awesome.
I took some screenshots of models in maya and tried to replicate the effect in Photoshop. I wasn't able to replicate the bloom as I imagined it in my head, but I was able to get a bit of a toon effect just by applying a simple find edges algorithm. I tried applying bloom by using a soft low opacity brush and going over the brighter areas but it appears to glow rather than bloom. The textures that were applied to the models don't have much detail, and the models have a low-poly count, so when I applied the simple find edges effect in Photoshop and layered it on top of the original screenshot, it already looked toon, the only thing that would need to be applied properly would be a cel shading effect.
