How to Make Second Life Look Like It's Cel Shaded à la Borderlands

Because so many readers loved that hack for making Second Life look like a line drawing (someone is already using that to make a "Take on Me" machinima, right?), here's another set of tweaks to make Second Life look like it's cel shaded, as above -- you know, like in the popular Borderlands games. This hack, unsurprisingly, comes from SL graphics master NiranV, creator of the Black Dragon SL viewer. All you have to do, he explains, is adjust SL's screen space ambient occlusion settings: "Set SSAO max scale very low, scale super high, its factor super high and strength super low and viola, you get cel shading via SSAO. For a better effect turn off light softening."

If that's a bit over your head like mine, don't worry -- here's the settings to play with in the Black Dragon viewer, and some tips for doing it in the official viewer:

 "In Black Dragon you can find all the settings in 'Preferences - Display - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion'." (See above)

For the standard Linden Lab viewer, you can find these settings under "Graphics - Advanced Settings", and fine tune the effect in the Debug Settings. 

Not sure at press time how to get to these settings in the Firestorm viewer, but if you're an FS user and you know, post in Comments. And if you make a cool action machinima in the Wastelands using this effect, post the video in Comments too!

Comments

[vwfan]

Nice. Thanks Niran. Is there a way to edit the shaders in the shaders folder? I've tried to modify them but really didn't notice a difference even relaunching the viewer. I'm guessing the shaders are compiled into the viewer? Or I did something wrong. I don't know. I think it would be neat to edit shaders ourselves on-the-fly (to some extent) so we could even share them with the community.

[Tobias Roth]

Shaders can be altered by anyone at any time and just need to be reloaded (toggle the specific graphic option off and on again), you need to alter the correct shaders (level 1 shaders for windlight and deferred without shadows and level 2 for with shadows). Breaking some shaders may crash the Viewer has it has no fallback shaders or rendering (BD does not have the legacy rendering working anymore, so crashing all fallback shaders will explode the Viewer)

[vwfan]

@Tobias - Thank you

[TheLilithCo]

Fun! I played with both this & the light blow out line drawing tech for a video I put together today & I like the initial results enough to keep messing with it in future https://flic.kr/p/QFbqJu