What is Comic Shading and Outlining?

ThomasN7

Champions Online has a distinctive visual style called ‘comic-shading’, which attempts to bring a comic-book look to a realistically lighted game world. I spoke to lead graphics programmer Jimb Esser about this style, and the optional ‘outlining’ feature.

Colin: What can you tell me about comic shading and how it differs from cell shading?

Jim: We’re trying to go for the look you get in a comic book. But comics don’t transfer directly to real time 3D very well. Cell shading often looks really bland and has very little detail in it so we have decided on a more realistic lighting model.

If something is bumpy you’ll see the bumps and you’ll get highlights and shadows and that kind of stuff. But on top of that we have an art style that’s similar to comic books with bright colors and things that aren’t necessarily realistic. And then also we have an outline effect that outlines things that are near to the camera and adds to that comic-book feel.

We wanted to make this distinction because cell shading has taken on an almost negative connotation within the industry of looking boring. Artists get upset about being labeled with this generic term. It implies similarity to games that really aren’t similar at all.

Practically it refers to a specific way of doing the lighting. So on a round object you don’t get a smooth transition from dark to light on one side, you’ve got a white and then you’ve got a harsh edge. It’s similar to how you shade something in a comic book but we wanted to bring realistic lighting and a comic-book look.

Colin: The outlining feature can be switched off. Why?

Jimb: At some point the option has got to be there for performance. And also, if it is something that bugs even a small number of people it doesn’t cost us anything to let them turn it off if they want to.

All of our official screenshots and videos are going to have it on and most people agree it looks great. But somebody might get annoyed by it when playing, for one reason or another.

Certainly, if you’re playing on a low machine you won’t have outlining and you won’t have any number of effects that you get on a high end machine.

For the most part it’s automatic. There are certainly machine configurations but there are options so that if your machine isn’t detecting correctly you can go in the options and turn things off if you want to

Colin: So there’s no ‘cell-shaded mode’ as such…

Jimb: No. In theory if we wanted an actual cell-shaded mode or a different lighting map, we could add that into our engine but that’s not what’s happening in Champions. It’s not really the look that the artists want. Even the issue of outlining is based on performance. If performance wasn’t going to be an issue, for some low-end PCs, we probably wouldn’t offer [turning it off] as an option because it looks really good and it’s part of the game’s central artistic vision.

Colin: Let’s get back to the overall artistic vision. During development, do you draw much inspiration from games that you play, or do you start off with a pretty clear vision of what you’re going to do and so everything else is irrelevant?

Jimb: I definitely draw a lot of inspiration. If I know about some game that’s coming up and they put out a trailer that has something really neat, we’re like ‘ooh, let’s take ten minutes to talk about maybe adding that or using it as a platform for inspiration’.

Also from the tech side we often go to Game Developer’s Conference and other conferences. We look at the presentations and we take away what’s useful and inspiring. That’s just part of the creative process. I’d be surprised if our work wasn’t also being scrutinized.

Colin: You’ve been here at Cryptic for over six years, and so you worked on City of Heroes and Villains. What do you see as the main difference between those projects and Champions Online?

Jimb: I think mostly it’s managing the scale of this project. We have a lot more stuff we want to do and a lot more things we want our engine to do for this and all of our future products. We’re using the same engine for Champions as we are for Star Trek Online and we’re building on it for games in the future.

So just making sure of the scale of having all those features and how they work together. City of Heroes had a very small feature set graphics wise, because that’s all the hardware could do then. Now there are lots of things that we want to get working that weren’t possible before.

Colin: Is there a danger that you’ve got too many options, too many effects, too many tricks?

Jimb: At some point in development you get to a point where you can have too many options. Often if you have a small number of options, telling somebody to work inside that box can make them very creative. Even though they have fewer options they might do more creative things in less time.

At the same time, if you have a lot of options people spend time fiddling and experimenting which can be good, sometimes you’re going to get something really neat. But even though we have lots more stuff we can do with the current engine, by magnitude, we don’t use all of them all the time. I think we have the balance about right.

 

Source: championsonlinedailynews.com/what-is-comic-shading-and-outlining/