great job man, i just checked using some light setups and the character is receiving shadows properly, the menacing t-pose shadow is no longer. We are this close to the perfect anime shader, there's just one issue with the outline plugin that id like to report(sorry if it was supposed to post in the other page).
It seems that whenever there's a body party in front of another it creates a transparency in the outline making it invisible.
I did some other tests and it seems that the atom skin color have a direct correlation to how the outline will behave regardless of what outline color you choose. If the character have white/fair skin and the background is dark, the outline will be more visible and if the background is less dark it will be less visible/transparent(which is the inverse of what should happen with a dark outline).
Alternatively if your character have a dark skin and the background is white the outline will behave like it should and be visible, and almost invisible in a dark background. But no matter what skin or outline color you choose it will never appear if it's in front of the character itself. I dunno if this info helps or not, just disregard if it's stuff you already knew.
Right now, the most challenging task is improving the outline plugin.
The way the outline works is that when the asset bundle loads, a large cube appears.
I made the shader so that any object inside the cube gets outlined.
Since the cube is huge, the characters, assets, and even the camera view all exist inside it.
The outline appears based on distance, and thickness or spread can be adjusted with sliders.
But making it more precisely controllable—that’s honestly beyond me. As I’ve said many times, I don’t actually know how to code.
Just a few months ago, I thought of a desktop as nothing more than a game console, and I’m still not much different, haha.
I just reference plugins from the Hub, come up with slightly different concepts, and work with ChatGPT to test whether the ideas or improvements are feasible.
So, if I ever improve the outline plugin, I’d probably have to rebuild it from scratch—rewrite both the shader and the script, and rethink the entire system.
And right now, I need to focus on scene production.
I’ve spent too much time on plugin development.
My supporters are not here for plugins—they want scenes.