How to show detail in very dark shadows with the use of cel shading.

Hello guys

I’m new to posting on Blenderastists so i hope this is on the right page.
English isn’t my first language so please excuse me if I’m not making 100% sense.

I’m currently working on my first short film for my last year studying Animation and Film. I’m using cel shading as my main style and as the year went on we had a lot of bumps but we figured it out as we worked. The problem I have now is, I’m using very dark shadows but I want to show detail from the textures in the scene. I will explain what I mean in screen shots below, I don’t know what you call this technique so please excuse myCe explanation.

The Wolf Among Us used this in the game and I’m trying to achieve what they did. I’m not gonna add an image for this as i can only add a certain amount per post.

I’m trying to figure out how I can do that in my scene, another example I found on the internet was from a guy that used it in his showreel/portfolio. He used Maya so I think its an actually think you can use in Maya, but i don’t know. I tried to get in contact with him but he never responded to my email. (you can see this in his first screenshot on his website)

http://dsommerville.com/

In the image he says he used, “Alpha used with light attenuation mask to reveal texture in shadow”, now I have no understanding what the means and my lecturer told me there inst something like light attenuation in blender yet. :frowning:

We did a few tests with the nodes and mixing of nodes but can’t figure out how to show the detail in just the shadows and not in the light as-well. Here is my testing processes in images,


Here I used the same setup that i uses in my scenes in the film, this is without any tests just the base look.


Then I created a second texture with just the “detail” from the normal texture with the same color too, this is exactly how I want it to look just inside the shadows and not the light.


After tinkering around a lot I ended up with this effect where i used an emission node on the .png texture. the only problem with this is that it emits inside the light as well.

I hope this was a clear explanation, I really could use your guys help, so thanks for taking the time to read.

Thanks again