2d pixel art from 3d model?

does anybody know if its possible to use shaders to achieve a level of 2d pixel like this from 3d characters?

 

i remember seeing this in blender,
http://www.cgchannel.com/2015/02/this-free-blender-shader-turns-3d-models-into-pixel-art/

 

I know but that's not a shader it's a tool that renders models as 2d pixel art
also its not for unity

 

There's a number of things in the asset store, as well as some games out there that use special shaders and careful art setups to create the look of 2D sprites. However matching the specific style of something like those on the link you posted would be very difficult as there's a lot of "cheats" that happen in 2D art to make things look good which can't be replicated just by using a shader.

There's stuff like @kode80 's pixel render: http://kode80.com/blog/2016/02/23/pixelrender-for-unity3d/index.html
Or @Howard-Day 's unreleased side project: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-small-works-art-thread.145172/page-105#post-2330367 http://www.hedfiles.net/PixelShader/
And there's a ton of "toon" or "anime" style shaders out there that can be used to get similar results.

There's a great talk from one of the Guilty Gear Xrd devs (which is not Unity, it's UE3 based actually) on the work they did to get their stuff to not feel 3D. A lot of the look was from not using animation blending, careful (but intentionally jittery) posing, and a lot of special case mesh swaps. And that's just to get a high resolution hand drawn anime look, pixel art is actually harder.

 

I guess I will wait until @Howard-Day has released his hopefully it will support custom palettes

 

..You're gonna be waiting a while. :/ It does support whatever palette you want - it uses LUTs for the task. Basically, just run your standard Unity color correction LUT through photoshop's color indexing. Bam, done. Also, my system works far better on mechanical and non-organic shapes..it's also far from ready for release. At this point, it's a wide assortment of lightly-related scripts and shaders, not anything unified.

 

Btw, are you familiar with this trick? http://www.alkemi-games.com/a-game-of-tricks-iv-stylized-normal-mapping/

 

yeah its completey possible but iv only seen it in unity (the programe it
self)