I wanted to try and make an implementation of the Tonal Art Map technique described in this paper and this is the result. I wasn’t totally blown away by the result, so I decided to move on to something different, but the effect can look pretty nice when applied to something like a flag:
Higher res version, you can’t really see what’s going on in this gif
The idea is that things like lighting and shading shouldn’t look how a computer renders them, with gradient colors, but more how an artist that does hatching would do it, with varying the amount of hatches. This version integrates with Unity’s standard lighting pipeline and applies the tonal art map as the final step, so that it can benefit from the calculation of the lighting.
The project includes both a generator that generates the tonal art map as well as a shader that can render it.