Hi! @Demothene gave me the idea to open this thread to help others to make shaders for Pokémon similar to the original games.

This thread will focus on discussions about POKÉMON SHADERS, so anyone can post ideas, nodes and ask about shaders. We usually work in Unity Engine, but once you have the idea, you can make the shaders and materials in any engine.

It is in Nintendo Switch threads because we will try to replicate all the needed Let's Go and Sword and Shield shaders.

I will be updating the post while nice things appear here.

IMPORTANT: Shaders nor models will be shared. You will have to make them (and export them) yourself. Here we just share the logic of how to do them, or even the specific nodes you would need to use in Shader Graph / Amplify Shader Editor.


POKÉMON LETS GO:

Pallet Town Field Floor (By FabDelb):

Spoiler

In this case, the Pallet Town floor is made by blending textures with a function.
In a first pass, the lighting is calculated based on directional light + cloud texture. Then, use this function and add it to the previous vertex color calculated in the first pass.

Approx. result:

How can be accomplished in Unity with Shader Amplify Editor:

Main Shader:

Blending function:

POKÉMON SHADERS:

Fire Pokémon Shaders - Blender (By Wiimonkey2):

Spoiler

Fire in all the 3D pokémon games is accomplished with opacity masks and blending albedos.
You can easily follow this tutorial in Blender:

I need ripping help:

I made other useful tutorials that you may need:

- Export Pokémon from 3DS
- Export Let's Go Trainers and rig them with mixamo


Can you show me a final result:

Finally you can get something like this:

How do you know how shaders work?

You can take a look to the original shader code following this tutorial: https://gbatemp.net/threads/tutoria...hader-code-from-nintendo-switch-games.546522/

Discord?

I just made a discord: Link

Credits:

- @Demothene
- FabDelb
- Random Talking Bush
- Me <3

 

[Manurocker95]

-- Snip-- Reserved

 

[madmert9]

Is it possible to add some new pokemons by changing genuine ones' models ?

 

[Manurocker95]

Is it possible to add some new pokemons by changing genuine ones' models ?

if you mean replacing the meshes...yes, you should be able to repack the binary. However, this is for doing shaders so... this is not the correct thread

 

[Manurocker95]

If anyone has a question about shaders, please post ^^

 

[MoMoTank]

The discord invite expired

 

[Manurocker95]

The discord invite expired

Replaced with an illimited one

 

[catlover007]

do you have any idea how the outlines in the 3ds titles are accomplished? I've been wondering about that for a long time. I know from a citra progress report that they're somehow repurposing the stencil/depth buffer as a color buffer. The effect has to be done completely on gpu with fixed function hw, otherwise the outline wouldn't scale with the upscaled rendering in citra.
I already analysing a frame from citra in renderdoc, but it crashed

 

[Manurocker95]

do you have any idea how the outlines in the 3ds titles are accomplished? I've been wondering about that for a long time. I know from a citra progress report that they're somehow repurposing the stencil/depth buffer as a color buffer. The effect has to be done completely on gpu with fixed function hw, otherwise the outline wouldn't scale with the upscaled rendering in citra.
I already analysing a frame from citra in renderdoc, but it crashed

Hmm, no idea, but it really looks like aregular outline shader with GPU instancing and a few tweaks

 

[catlover007]

Hmm, no idea, but it really looks like aregular outline shader with GPU instancing and a few tweaks

too bad. The thing is that the 3ds has no shaders, but it's far too accurate and precise to be just classic, scale model a bit and flip normals.

 

[Manurocker95]

too bad. The thing is that the 3ds has no shaders, but it's far too accurate and precise to be just classic, scale model a bit and flip normals.

how is it possible to render stuff without shaders? Hmm, I will ask on discord if anyone knows about this

 

[catlover007]

how is it possible to render stuff without shaders? Hmm, I will ask on discord if anyone knows about this

the way it's done during the old days

Before graphic hardware was programmable during multiple stages (it's geometry, vertex, tesselation and fragment these days), a fixed set of operations are performed with your draw data (that's why it's called fixed pipeline). So for example, you configure a matrix in before hand, which is used to transform the vertices etc. You could setup multiple lights, the formula of which was of course build into hw, but you could choose material properties, maybe even one of a few lighting algorithms.

The pica200 is a bit "the last of it's kind". While it's vertex and fragment stage are programmable, it's fragment stage is not, to reduce chip size, thus reducing price and energy consumption. But instead of those old gpu which had maybe phong lighting or so, it has a ton of, state of the art would be exegerated, but modern features, like fresnel effect, toon lighting with a configurable lookup table, shadow mapping, just hardwired.

 

[Manurocker95]

@catlover007 hmmm, I tried to make an outline shader with fresnel, but it seems to be a lot worse (with even more cost) than scaling one. I would still go with regular shader or... maybe you are right and they store mon stencil buffer and make a small displacement. In a second pass, render the regular model.


Edit: btw, found this. One of them is made with fresnel and other with scaling

 

[momin]

Wonderful post!! Muchas thanks

Let me dare to ask, what about the new Zelda Awakening Switch remake which looks sooooo extremely cute and beautiful? Besides the tilt shift, is there any shader magic to get this clay/diorama look?

 

[Manurocker95]

Wonderful post!! Muchas thanks

Let me dare to ask, what about the new Zelda Awakening Switch remake which looks sooooo extremely cute and beautiful? Besides the tilt shift, is there any shader magic to get this clay/diorama look?

The game looks like that because it has A LOT of post processing. They did a great plastic shader tho

 

[Coto]

the way it's done during the old days

Before graphic hardware was programmable during multiple stages (it's geometry, vertex, tesselation and fragment these days), a fixed set of operations are performed with your draw data (that's why it's called fixed pipeline). So for example, you configure a matrix in before hand, which is used to transform the vertices etc. You could setup multiple lights, the formula of which was of course build into hw, but you could choose material properties, maybe even one of a few lighting algorithms.

The pica200 is a bit "the last of it's kind". While it's vertex and fragment stage are programmable, it's fragment stage is not, to reduce chip size, thus reducing price and energy consumption. But instead of those old gpu which had maybe phong lighting or so, it has a ton of, state of the art would be exegerated, but modern features, like fresnel effect, toon lighting with a configurable lookup table, shadow mapping, just hardwired.

You really speak like an open source graphics hardware/driver developer.

edit: that or a coder from the SGI N64 Rasterizer days. ;-)

 

[catlover007]

You really speak like an open source graphics hardware/driver developer.

edit: that or a coder from the SGI N64 Rasterizer days. ;-)

The n64 is several years older than me

 

[Manurocker95]

Just a reminder that if anyone wants to share a shader, I will post it in the OP

 

[squishguin]

Hey @Manurocker95 I was wondering if you had any luck recreating the field shaders in ShaderGraph

 

[Manurocker95]

Hey @Manurocker95 I was wondering if you had any luck recreating the field shaders in ShaderGraph

It should be exactly the same as ASE