Ok took a couple of the pics from the wiki to show you. These are the toon and fur shaders.Both would be very difficult if not impossible without shaders. You could as you said use black outlines for your chacter but only if it would be seen from on angle at a time in a 3d enviroment chances are your chacter will be changing positions all the time so you would have to have multiple skins in order to acheive something similliar.The fur shader would be very very difficult to achieve with a skin in my opinion.


You have to think that each angle your chacter can be viewed from would change the way the chacter would look and change the way the shading needs to be applied so would take a lot of skins not to mention coding to get something to look decent.

and bumpmapping to my knowledge and expeirence with it in other programs will basically give more depth to you other wise flat walls. Say you have a brick wall texture. With bumpmapping you could acctually make it look as tho the bricks stand further out then the mortar. which could probally be achieved with a good texture. but im sure theres many other reason why a shader would be a better way to go.

these are just my opinions and thoughts on it tho