Toonish Looks

Hi there!

Toonish Looks is a visual/cosmetic mod that aims to make characters and/or cars look more cartoonish and flat looking (like the Simpsons Game).
It is intended as more of a modding resource for others to use in their own mods but will work on its own of course.

At first i didn't think that it could be done, but after a month of messing around with the modding tools and figuring things out, i have come up with something that seems to work AND also obey level/environment lighting levels.



I still have a long way to go.

Release 1 aims to have all characters in the game done (Minus character costumes) and include the Family sedan(al-tho it will be missing damage textures)
cars are something i would like to work on at a later date but is not a priority ATM.

Toonish is coming soonish

This is so great, I can't wait to see more stuff being done! I see some characters (generic woman picture 6) are yet to be done, so good luck on that.

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Thanks Maz!
Making progress. Funny thing i didn't know about the pedestrians was the game changes their colour pallet sometimes, i thought i broke something when testing them out in game haha.

Meant to comment on it yesterday when I liked this post, but got rather busy!

Incredible work honestly! I'm a huge sucker for games that use cel shading since I find the bold outlines and colors such an appealing style (actually checked out Taz: Wanted solely for it and I enjoyed my brief time with Cel Damage). Not sure if some of that love comes from enjoying the Sly Trilogy as a kid. I think the style lends itself to The Simpsons IP very well and is why EA opted for the style while developing The Simpsons Game. We also know that Radical wanted a more toon-y style for Road Rage, which after being changed midway through development, is probably why SHAR ended up with the art style it had.

However, while The Simpsons Game is sort of cel-shaded, I kinda preferred the model work in Hit & Run. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it didn't feel quite as appealing as Hit & Run's character models. This is great to see and I'd definitely play through the game with this sort of model work!

And yeah, it's fun to see how the game handles the randomized pedestrian colors. Looking forward to seeing more work in this style!

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Thank you Kenny appreciate the interest.

I always liked the cell shading look the moment i saw it, I think it was the Sly games for me too. Games with cell shading seem to age a lot better imo (more style than realism).

i didn't know about the early road rage footage! wow!. imagine having that conversation, your video game needs to look more like a video game?? lol. the detail on that map looked great.

Yeah the Simpsons game models do seem a bit off. not sure what it is tho , like nothing is wrong with them really but idk. maybe their colour? they seem a bit pale yellow, or maybe they are a bit too clean and angled? some kind of uncanny valley haha.

i did a quick test of Frink-ality with Toonish. Other than the alternate timeline family sedan (mod loader merged them? lol) it seems too work well.

Yeah, the Sly games still look really freaking good for the system. Out of all the PlayStation 2 mascot platformers for the system, I think Sly just had the nicest art direction of the bunch since that's aged a lot more gracefully.

Yeah, the alternative 'toon' style for Road Rage has been discussed a little bit by the uploader of the footage linked above. The short version is that Matt Groening apparently disliked the art style and requested a change midway through development? It's sort of why Road Rage is this really awkward middle ground. A majority of the textures from Level 1 of Frink-ality come from that prototype since it leaked online (a user had suggested them to me as a potential base), but a couple of custom ones had to be created (such as the cars and houses). Really cool to see the two meshed together! Think it looks really nice.

I actually never noticed how the skin palette in Simpsons Game appears slightly more pale. Perhaps that's part of it and the way the outlines are handled?

But yeah! Great stuff all around. It's just really visually charming and a nice take on the character models.

im very excited to see what this becomes. how are you planning on doing the textures, are they gonna be like a flat colour too? cheers and good luck

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Thank you!

Yes, a main ingredient for this look is flattening the textures, cars are mostly affected as they rely more on textures than colour pallets.

my process is to up res the textures enough to reduce the pixelated look, remove any drawn on shading and then try to replace the details with black lines and borders.

for details i like to use the tv show as a reference and then try to get a mix of the show and SHAR for the end result.

An example i can give is the family sedan,
I am happy to release a demo of the car if you would like to check it out/de-compile/use. Grab it here

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Note This demo file has its lighting disabled and environment map disabled as they don't look correct by themselves/removed from the rest of Toonish Looks.

the environment texture is left in the files if you want to turn it back on.
lighting being disabled means it will look normal for the most part but going into darker areas like the nuclear power plant or anywhere lvl 3 on-wards will look weird.

it should work in both direct x 8 and 9 modes. but dx9 will work better. Had some problems with 8 sometimes ignoring the lighting arguments.
also recommend using some kind of anti aliasing (4x MSAA is the sweet spot for me).