Renzatic on 13/3/2015 at 17:04

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The depth of field looks pretty good, but I'm not feeling the edge detect. My personal opinion? I think your blocky style for would lend itself better to a construction paper/cardboard look than sorta-ish comic art.

With more realistic lighting and a slight tweak to your textures, you could make it look like a little puppet play brought to life. Kinda like what I was going for with (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Graveyard_Assets_2.jpg) this back in the day.

Renzatic on 14/3/2015 at 02:27

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It's hardly a proprietary idea, so go for it. :P

Hell, I wouldn't mind helping you out. But considering you need someone to assist you in putting the game, between my flaky schedule, and me feeling like I need to learn more before I jump into anything like this even part time, it makes me too cautious to commit.

Though that doesn't mean I can't make suggestions or play around with your style in my spare time. What I'd do is make it a little more detailed, but not overly complicated. You don't want to ruin the charm of the style you've got now by throwing too much at it. Like for your characters, some of the more ornate papercraft models would be a good thing to look at for inspiration.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Papercraft1.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Papercraft2.jpg

...but you don't want to stretch it out too far. What you've got is already pretty good.

Then to get that realistic but not quite look to it, you'll want to rely on subtle shadowing to make all the individual parts stand out more, rather than big fields of flat color.

Which means MOAR AMBIENT OCCLUSION!

To toot my own horn again, and show off stuff I've already shown off, (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Low_Poly_Catacombs_Render_2.jpg) this scene was made of faceted polys, single colors, with an environment based AO baked in. I'm just about definite you can bake AO onto a shadow texture assigned to a second UV channel, and get about that same look in Unity. Though you'd obviously want to go a little more subtle with it, since you're going to have realtime lighting in your game. You want enough to be noticeable, but not enough that it gives you permanent shadows like what you're seeing here.

Renzatic on 14/3/2015 at 18:45

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I wouldn't call that more simplistic. It's pretty damn good, and a much better example of the style than mine was.

Renzatic on 16/3/2015 at 17:37

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(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Paper.zip) Here you go. I included three paper textures, a grungemap I'd use sparingly to add some differentiation, and a PSD/PNG for my little gravestones to serve as a working example. I also threw in the entire catacombs model for you to check out.

Depending on the colors and the size of the object, I'd vary the transparency of the paper layers and play with the blends to get the look I wanted. From what I saw in your screenshot, your wrinkles are too fine, too obviously repeating, and too bold. It doesn't look like paper, more like stucco. You'll also want to add the tiniest amount of jitter to your models so they're not made up of perfectly flat planes. You'll need to up the poly count on your models by just a bit to do this and make it look good, but you're pretty low poly as is, so it shouldn't hurt performance at all.

Whew. If you've got any questions, feel free to ask. Hell, I might end up trying something out for you myself once I get through watching this character modelling tutorial.

Renzatic on 16/3/2015 at 19:38

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Your crease details are still way too fine. Think of it like a piece of construction paper you ball up real quick, then unfold. The wrinkles won't be nearly so small.

Also, it looks like you've normalmapped it. The only way you can keep it from looking too plasticy is to make the normal really, really slight. To the point its almost flat, and only acts to subtly highlight the wrinkles. Otherwise, you'll end up with something that looks like this...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/fakestucco.jpg

...more than paper.

And lastly, think of it like you're making a complicated model or diorama. Everything isn't going to be made out of papier mache, so you don't want wrinkles all over the place, only where they're appropriate. Think of it like a cross between this...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Diorama1.jpg

and this...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3018396/Diorama2.jpg

...or papier mache, cardboard, and construction paper. Your characters will be the one thing that benefits the most from it. Your environments? They'll be a mix and match. Make the object look like what'll it make the most sense to make it out of if you were building it out of these materials.

As for your lighting, it looks good if your bridge is in red alert, like your zeppelin is crashing. But under normal operating procedures, aka everyday lighting, you'll rarely want to stray too far away from the desaturated end of the color spectrum. Try to make it so that you've got the hint of color coming from your main lights, and let your ambient lighting do the heavier color work on the bolder end of the spectrum. Like that first diorama image? It looks almost like his streetlights are yellow-white, but the ambient color gives everything a greenish yet (there's also some blue in the mix there on the higher end of the image, but I'm going with the major colors here).

But as with everything, the end result all depends on taste. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as one rule you gotta live by. It's more about what looks good, and fits the mood.

edit: Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure those textures came from CGTextures.