Ink and Gouache: Toon and Cel-Shaded Materials

Build a cartoon world that looks like one cartoon. Ink and Gouache is 24 toon materials made to belong together: the same flat light bands, one shared palette, one dark ink outline of one weight. Put a brick wall, a grass path, a wooden door and a tree side by side and they read as one picture.

What is in the box

• Cel-shaded basics: riveted metal, timber, flagstones, masonry blocks, red brick, floor planks, and ground surfaces (grass, dirt, sand, rock). Light falls in crisp flat bands, never smooth gradients.
• Flat palette: roof red, leaf green, wall cream, water teal, trunk brown, for low-poly props.
• Hand-painted: grass, a stone wall, planks, roof tiles and foliage, with brush-stroke light painted in.
• Gradient-mapped: two-tone shiny brass, foliage, animated toon water and a softly breathing warm glow.
• Ink outline: a depth-correct dark outline, 3 cm thick on every object, that you switch on and off per object, for every player.
• One place for the look: change the number of light bands, or switch every outline off, for the whole set, live, for everyone.
• Two guides: how to make your game look like a cartoon, and a step-by-step cel-shaded village from an empty world.

Real-world sizes (1 unit = 1 m), seamless when tiled, every material inside the web's texture limits (26.7 MB for all 24).

Walk the gallery: you arrive in the swatch gallery with every material on four shapes, its reference picture and a readable label, under six shared lighting looks. Just ahead and to your left, in an opening of the gallery ring, stands a little toon cottage corner built only from these materials, placed so it hides none of the labels.

Use it in your world

1. Install it. Search ZeroMind for "toonMaterials" or "Ink and Gouache" and install the toonMaterials package, or run this in the engine shell:

zero zeromind installAsset aafbaae5-5d94-4661-b8d4-688eeed11d1b

It brings the Swatchbook material library (materialLibraryKit) along. From then on the 24 toon materials are in the library's list, picker and gallery on every player's machine, and the ink outline starts by itself, with no setup code.

2. Put a material and the ink outline on something (from the console or any script):

local Materials = require("~materialLibraryKit.Materials")
local ToonInk = require("~toonMaterials.ToonInk")

local cube = entity.spawn("toonCube", { synced = true, components = { Model = { model = "cube" } } })
cube.localPosition = { 0, 1, 3 }
assert(Materials.apply(cube, "toonMetal"))   -- cel-shaded riveted steel, for every player
assert(ToonInk.set(cube, true))              -- the dark ink outline, for every player

Swap the look by changing one word: Materials.apply(cube, "toonBrick"). For level pieces, a ToonProp component gives an object its outline from the scene file and lays its material out at real size.

3. Change the look of the whole set, for everyone:

local ToonLook = require("~toonMaterials.ToonLook")
ToonLook.set({ bands = 4 })          -- four light bands on every toon material
ToonLook.set({ outlines = false })   -- every ink outline off
ToonLook.reset()                     -- back to the defaults

4. Read the guides. They ship inside the package and open in the engine's guides by their full path: toonMaterials.package/guides/makeYourGameLookLikeACartoon and toonMaterials.package/guides/buildACelShadedCartoonVillage. The package README lists every material with its tags, tile size and texture memory, and the known limits.

Good to know: if you also install materialLibraryKit on its own after toonMaterials is already in your world (for its other collections, tools or gallery), reload the world once afterwards. Until you do, the library reports problems for some of its own calibration materials, and outline switches from other players do not arrive (engine issue #22328).