I have been thinking on how I could effectively use existing textures, while also keeping a cartoony artstyle.
Before I mainly just gave the textures a different colour. While it works fine, it doesn't give much flexibility for interesting shading, which makes texture often look very flat.
Making my own textures, while giving me more flexibility, isn't very appealing to me, not only because it would take a long time, something I hardly have as a solo dev, but mainly because I am not confident I could make pretty textures on my own, not to mention making stuff like normal maps for them.
So to get around some of my issues, I made this masking shader based on value. And instead of just throwing a colour on top, this uses a gradient.
Have the value check the gradient, and voila: a texture with multiple colours. I set these gradients to constant, meaning there is no in between colours, just for a more cartoony look. While definitely not perfect, it will allow for a bit more depth in my textures.
