Cell-shading without shader

Code Snippets
1

if you’r looking for a way to get a cartoony look on your character but you dont own or dont want to use shaders this is the solution for you.

ape = loader.loadModel("ape2.egg")
tex = loader.loadCubeMap('cubemap_#.png')
ape.setTexGen(TextureStage.getDefault(), TexGenAttrib.MWorldNormal)	
ape.setTexture(tex, 1)	
ape.reparentTo(render)

this will use a cubemap…
(see the manual how to draw them)
…which is colored in your shadow tones…
(in most cases white on the top. a light grey in the middle and a darker gray near the bottom with pretty hard transitions between the colors)
…and set it up as textur stage 1 (you might want to chose it to stage 2 if you use normal textures on your model instead of vertex-colors only)
if you use a normal color you need to blend the 2 textures with the “modulate” mode.

this method dosent take any light source into account since it thought to be applyed to a fully lit environment (default light) anything else will produce a smooth AND a cell shading effect on the model.but you can paint your cubemap the way it maches with a sun your sky.
if you did everything right you should get results simmilar to this one (only the blender ape and the cubemap as the only texture)

2

Is anyone aware for any non-shader techniques for cartoon inking as well?

3

Hm, there was some kind of trick with duplicating the model, making it black, and rendering it inside-out.

4

hm theoretically it is possible even without dubplicated models, at least a rough aproximation.
it works simmilar to the cubemap approach for the shading. except you let the cubemap rotate with the camera and darken it so a sphere would have a black border.but be white on the inside.
this method has it’s limits but if you are a bit carefull with your model geometry it might work quite well. given most (even older gpu’s) can handle 4 texturestages in one pass there should be almost no performance loss.