Wow, I finally got it. I started to think that good anime shading is one of the top secrets that no one wants to share their knowledge about so that they remain superior. Thank you a lot. I really appreciate that you weren't selfish.
so true when I was learning there was no resources, this video is so great and understandable for not only me and new people wanting to learn about anime modeling.
it's not even just blender anime shading, i literally could not find any game dev resources to make good anime shading. Everyone just knows, and nobody makes tutorials for it, it's sooo annoying.
@@taranjk1 I do not like normal editing if you see how the shadows is working it breaking the functionally. For Example if they put a cube in from on the face here to see how it handles the casted shadow off it will not function correctly.
I remember the GDC talk about GuiltyGear Xrd doing this and how it was done, and I've been searching for a way to do this fast enough to be good to iterate on, and it's glad to see more people show ways to achieve it.
HOLY SHIT, AFTER LITERALLY YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. FINALLY A VIDEO THAT EXPLAIN HOW THIS WORKS! I always got some bits and pieces here and there and already had an idea how it worked, but it's nice to finally see it in detail.
I have seen a lot of toon shading videos with custom normals in blender, but this has to be the best. You explained everything very well and even for a beginner its very easy to understand. Very nice!
Im happy theres more tutorials on how to do this. I've gone with the SDF face shadows instead personally, because it makes transitions really easy and it works well in vrchat.
@@TheWiseChickens signal-distance field or something. Basically in our case it uses a texture that goes from white the back as a gradient. It then compares the light and face vectors to determine where to use the shadow.
I remember attempting something like this years ago, but back then I lacked the general expertise to get anywhere with it. Might give it another go now!
Great video. I knew about this concept from analyzing the shadows in Genshin Impact and the like but this is the first video I've seen break down the method.
Pretty informative video, and you cover quite a bit of subjects too, but I'd highly discourage againts using the mark as sharp or spliting/seprating your mesh as you'd just be spliting the normals and causing posible issues down the line on the shading on the outlines generated from that mesh. If you wanna have an easy way to select the shadows you can simply mark as seam, asuming you are not currently on the UV Unwraping stage of course, it won't affect the look of the shading and won't change the actual UV Mapping unless you Unwrap yourself. If you don't wanna do that, another easy method is to create a temporary vertex group simply for quick selection of specific vertices, it should not affect rigging as long as the name isn't the name of a bone or parented object used to animate the character. Another thing is that you didn't add support loops to the shadows, that will help with the shading transition and shape. And for those who find Abnormal bothersome you can also simply edit normals by pressing Alt+N, and should be plenty options to change the direction of the vertex normals. Also, here's a translated slide of how Arc System Works aproaches modeling and a bit on custom normals, at the end of the slide theres links to the other translated articles (Erase spaces within periods, hopefuly this comment wont be marked as spam lol) docs. google .com/presentation/d/1WUvd9s8d_5ENBnbSpXo6ajdeTGODPr6S/
I was literally studying this type of shading on my own , mostly taking inspiration from guilty gear , and i was really struggling .. watching multiple videos , all different , and trying to put all the pieces together, and then this gem comes out , you have no idea how helpful this was :3 , none talked about the snappy normals , which was exactly what i wanted to achieve.
My friend, reaching your channel today was a miracle, it's the first time I've seen someone willing to share knowledge about this topic to help people, in general, to create better character shadows. I hope your channel grows to a million and your life will be full of happiness Thanks again for sharing this.💯
thank you very much. In Chinese internet I am hard to find anything to create good anime stylized shadow like this. this video help me a lot! Thank you again❤❤
An amazing art master that creates a game changer method. Thanks a lot for share your knowledge with all the people, you are too nice to us :) Have an amazing day, and hope all your dreams come true in this life!
I think an easier way to control normals is through normal maps. Tangent maps for animated characters, object normal maps for movable objects and maybe world space for environments. Height/Bump maps could be used as well for a more low fi method
You guys check a project called division of existence, it was done by blender. And the Shader was fully done in blender and seems to me they have the most advance knowledge on anime blender.. Considering the project was almost 6 years ago and the shading still is top.
It looks nice, but, likely only fit for stills due to the immediate jolt from light to dark, versus how it looks when you create 2D animation. It's worth attempting this with animation, as my initial thought is that the smooth animation, while 'stepped' shadows popping might not feel right.
15:55 Is there other solution for fixing the normals when animating? Because that is great inside blender but it doesnt work if you need to export to a game engine like Unity or Unreal :c
At 05:5 the video uses a mirror modifier, but when i use it, it will duplicate my model, is there a way to edit simultaneously the vertex without duplicating the model?
Thank you for the wonderful video. Nami you created is really cute and lovely.🥰 My question is, do you merge the separate face parts together in the end? When I try to merge, the normals merge and create strange shadows. I hope you can answer my question.
what about if u animate it, the transition doesnt look that right, or is there a way? ill go wih more simplistic normals and the rest is texture or light maps
Nice tutorial, just a question my character's head is already rigged and has multiple shape keys if I use knife tool to cut the face for shadows would it not break the shape keys and rig?
I'm wondering why not adjust the lighting per scene and bake onto the surface, shadow and all. Or just don't use lighting at all but model for the effect and simply use vectored zones. Either way works well.
can you export these custom normals as a image so you can play with it on external software ?? i feel like that someone could make the transitions better than just fiddling with it on blender
Yes, you could technically use an Object Space Normal map to force the different parts of the face to point in different directions, but that method would only apply to Blender because it happens in the shader. You would then have to set up a special shader in any other software/game engine to get it work. This method changes the normals for the faces so you can use it any software and the normals will stay this way
Also another question. That add on of yours. Does it automatically apply the lines on the mesh or would I still have to do it manually and it’s just only for the normals?
please someone help, i have error when I rotate normal direction from third mesh, referance(second) mesh's data tranfer modifier write that their topology do not match. But i changed only normal rotation and nothing else. How can i fix it?
Nothing important, that just has some textures in it, but I made it into a Node Group so that the Shader Editor wouldn't be messy with all of the Texture Coordinate and Mapping nodes
@@VertexArcade I was following the tutorial, but I got stuck at this stage. :( I do have a texture applied to the model, so how can I add it? I noticed that when you opened the Shading Editor, it was already there.
It's been a few years since I studied 3D, but I'm still a beginner. Still, I had a lot of questions, so I was always looking for them, and thank you for making a good video that answered what I was really curious about. I really have a question! If you duplicate the original like that and give perfect toon shading through the vertex information value, To create that effect, 'one flattened duplicate face and a sphere (for natural shading)' are these two objects kept in the 'hidden' state and continued to be used together with the original??? Sorry I'm a 3D beginner Or bake? Would it be possible to use the same technique to permanently reflect that shading in the original and delete those two unnecessary ones?
Well what you could do is isolate the face of a League model and then just do the mirror modifier on that instead of the whole body. Obviously it would depend on the character, but I'm sure most of them are symmetrical
Amazing work ! Thank you very much ! Have you tried to export your model in an other software to see if the normal work the same way ? Specially a game engine like unity or UE5?
Yeah, they definitely work in Unity, you just need to disable Normal Recalculation in the Mesh import settings. I haven't tried it in Unreal, but I'm sure the setting is somewhere
I'm curious. Some say don't use face data to a mesh that isn't it's exact same, but I want to use the normals aspect on a model that cannot have it's face edited (rigged) (otherwise I would have to import/export vertex and open close the bone to have the hundreds of shapekeys and vertex groups it has to still work). Is there a data transfer modifier setup that allows me to just transfer the data from edited normals face to a mesh with no normals edited?
What you could do is duplicate the model and apply the armature so that it isn't rigged anymore. You can then edit the normals for this mesh, and because it's exactly the same as the rigged mesh you can copy the normals like I showed in the video
Awesome tutorial! Thanks! It's interesting that despite the advancements in technology, 3D programs still struggle to execute cel shading the way we want. Even with the cutting-edge tech available today (such as NVidia Omniverse AI, a powerful UE5 material system, many great addons, etc), achieving cel-shading that truly resembles 2D artwork remains challenging. I mean, c'mon! With all this technology available, we still don't have a ready-to-go addon or similar?
I think it's because most graphics actively strive for photo-realism compared to hand drawn which requires a very different technical workflow. The normals for instance is due to the lighting not having cel rendering in mind. I've done some NPR work, I need to try this videos workflow when it comes to character modelling before I can say more on the subject.
@@Gear_Snack Agreed. All tech is aiming for realism. Creating cel-shaded normals with Data Transfer works like a charm (smooth hi to low poly), but it's the animation stage where I go all-in, squeezing and warping body parts to bring that organic expressiveness to life. But wow, does it ever take it out of me (And it's boring -___- )
@@Amelia_PC True, because of the way rigging is set up, using squash and stretch is difficult which is a problem as it's a key principle in 2D animation.
I think it’s because a lot of time folks are going about things in the “wrong” or more difficult way. I think the easiest way to get cel shaded normals is to use either a tangent normal map or a height/bump map. That way you can intuitively control the shapes and you can achieve a higher resolution without a lot of geometry
@@chidorirasenganz I think the animation is the hardest part of recreating a 2D look. Even Arc System Works's animations, with their great work, still look 3D. (I was trying to replicate the 90s cartoon flat color style, so I'm not dealing with shading now. Phew, one less headache )
Really interesting video. I can definitely see it being feasible for a small scale project but anything bigger would be dragged down by how repetitive and time consuming this is. Unless you're really dedicated to having the perfect anime aesthetic or you work in a big team I wouldn't bother. I still saved the video as this could perhaps be used for more than just faces, like helping direct the lighting on specific static props in the background for example.
Yeah it is somewhat time consuming but I've made so many of them now that I can probably finish one in about an hour or so, from start to finish. And you would only really do this style of custom normals for your main characters
Any idea how to use this method with shape keys?. When i deform the face of my character the custom normals gets distorted. I tried some data transfer to keep the custom normals on the shape key and it does transfer properly but when i go back to original shape the custom normals that previously were working fine now are broken. EDIT - seems it works fine for you when u data transfer from the B face to A face. But for some reason when i do and i turn the value of the shape key to 1 the normals still break >_
Okay, but if the model is being used for something like a game and is viewed from the side wont the faces be really flat? Like it looks great from the front but if you are looking at the same model from the side wont it look flat and weird?
No because changing the normals only changes the way shadows behave, it doesn't change the shape of the model. See the model at an angle at 14:00, it retains its shape at any angle while only the shadows change
@@EmiliyaS-fh1zj okay, because when he first flattened it all it looked like it made the model flat. Sorry, I'm a newb when it comes to modeling so I appreciate the explanation
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing! I would like to put this into Unity, so in the "Fixing bad shading while animating" section, it looks like we need that other head as a reference for shading, would I need to hide that head somehow while having it in unity?
In Unity you can choose to disable the Recalculation of Normals in the model import settings! There should be a checkbox to disable normal recalculation, it's been a while since I've used Unity but the setting is there somewhere! Just had a quick look and you need to change Blend Shape Normals from Calculate to None. I'm not sure how it would work with a rig with face bones, but you can definitely disable the shape key normal recalculation
@@VertexArcade thank you again for an amazing video! Really terrific explanations. Would this same idea apply in Unreal as it does in unity? (keeping the blender normal directions by telling it not to recalculate, normals, etc.)
bro i got used to blender 3.6 and mostly some rigging addons that i use there that wont work in 4.0. It is posible to apply this technology on blender 3.6? or im forced to update version.
Dude, you just broke my brain! I just finished a character project in UE5 that is rendered in a BotW-styled cell shader and I kinda wish I had this tutorial when I was working on it. I got around it by animating the lights positions and intensity in UE5 but it's not fool-proof. How would you transfer something like this in a game engine? Is this process software agnostic enough to do that?
Well hopefully for your next project this will be helpful! Yeah, these normals will transfer over to Game Engines but if you animate the face using Shape Keys you'll need to disable the Recalculation of Normals, and for armature face animation you'll need to do some research because I'm not sure how to do that
Wow, I finally got it. I started to think that good anime shading is one of the top secrets that no one wants to share their knowledge about so that they remain superior. Thank you a lot. I really appreciate that you weren't selfish.
so true when I was learning there was no resources, this video is so great and understandable for not only me and new people wanting to learn about anime modeling.
it's not even just blender anime shading, i literally could not find any game dev resources to make good anime shading. Everyone just knows, and nobody makes tutorials for it, it's sooo annoying.
Years of searching good anime shadow methods and this is the first tutorial that explains everything smoothly. Thanks!
lol I mean if it helps this video is only a week old 😅
,.@@apolloinparadise
literally same, there are so many clunky or very long tutorials that aren't good at explaining.
This vid is a godsend for information and speed.
@@taranjk1 I do not like normal editing if you see how the shadows is working it breaking the functionally. For Example if they put a cube in from on the face here to see how it handles the casted shadow off it will not function correctly.
Agreed
I remember the GDC talk about GuiltyGear Xrd doing this and how it was done, and I've been searching for a way to do this fast enough to be good to iterate on, and it's glad to see more people show ways to achieve it.
HOLY SHIT, AFTER LITERALLY YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. FINALLY A VIDEO THAT EXPLAIN HOW THIS WORKS!
I always got some bits and pieces here and there and already had an idea how it worked, but it's nice to finally see it in detail.
your normal editing add-on is the best christmas gift I've ever recieved bro XD
CANT THX YOU ENOUGH FOR THIS!
I have seen a lot of toon shading videos with custom normals in blender, but this has to be the best. You explained everything very well and even for a beginner its very easy to understand. Very nice!
oml thank you for this! I've tried a few different ways of doing this and none have worked how I want it to. This is easier to understand
This is pretty impressive, thanks for uploading! I’ve been meaning to try out toon shading but like you said, it’s pretty painful.
Well hopefully this process will make it a bit more simple!
What an incredible way to approach a solution to a problem. Great work.
Im happy theres more tutorials on how to do this. I've gone with the SDF face shadows instead personally, because it makes transitions really easy and it works well in vrchat.
I'm sorry, what does SDF mean?
@@TheWiseChickens signal-distance field or something. Basically in our case it uses a texture that goes from white the back as a gradient. It then compares the light and face vectors to determine where to use the shadow.
@@alecmackintosh2734 is it possible to use this method to shade the face on the X and Y axis? Since it normally follows the Z axis rotation...
@@bashartz technically yes but I wouldn't just because you'd have to blend them
I remember attempting something like this years ago, but back then I lacked the general expertise to get anywhere with it. Might give it another go now!
Great video. I knew about this concept from analyzing the shadows in Genshin Impact and the like but this is the first video I've seen break down the method.
Pretty informative video, and you cover quite a bit of subjects too, but I'd highly discourage againts using the mark as sharp or spliting/seprating your mesh as you'd just be spliting the normals and causing posible issues down the line on the shading on the outlines generated from that mesh. If you wanna have an easy way to select the shadows you can simply mark as seam, asuming you are not currently on the UV Unwraping stage of course, it won't affect the look of the shading and won't change the actual UV Mapping unless you Unwrap yourself. If you don't wanna do that, another easy method is to create a temporary vertex group simply for quick selection of specific vertices, it should not affect rigging as long as the name isn't the name of a bone or parented object used to animate the character.
Another thing is that you didn't add support loops to the shadows, that will help with the shading transition and shape. And for those who find Abnormal bothersome you can also simply edit normals by pressing Alt+N, and should be plenty options to change the direction of the vertex normals.
Also, here's a translated slide of how Arc System Works aproaches modeling and a bit on custom normals, at the end of the slide theres links to the other translated articles (Erase spaces within periods, hopefuly this comment wont be marked as spam lol)
docs. google .com/presentation/d/1WUvd9s8d_5ENBnbSpXo6ajdeTGODPr6S/
I was literally studying this type of shading on my own , mostly taking inspiration from guilty gear , and i was really struggling .. watching multiple videos , all different , and trying to put all the pieces together, and then this gem comes out , you have no idea how helpful this was :3 , none talked about the snappy normals , which was exactly what i wanted to achieve.
My friend, reaching your channel today was a miracle, it's the first time I've seen someone willing to share knowledge about this topic to help people, in general, to create better character shadows. I hope your channel grows to a million and your life will be full of happiness Thanks again for sharing this.💯
I did this twice with all manual movement of each normal a couple years ago. I'm glad you found a way to make it more streamlined. :D
This is actually an expensive trick, so I'm holding onto this method. Certain indie groups value this method a great deal
What do you mean by an expensive trick?
Very informative, makes so much more sense on how to approach after these explanations.
this is the best anime toon shading tutorial i've ever seen
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS I WAS WAITING FOR THIIIIIS
thank you very much. In Chinese internet I am hard to find anything to create good anime stylized shadow like this. this video help me a lot! Thank you again❤❤
In just 17 min wow. This is is a goldmine of information. Thank you soo much!
I've seen this done before, but your video was _much_ easier to follow.
An amazing art master that creates a game changer method. Thanks a lot for share your knowledge with all the people, you are too nice to us :)
Have an amazing day, and hope all your dreams come true in this life!
Thank you so much for sharing this! Now I see a chance to learn how to edit those ****normals.. Great video!
Good method with a high level of control and a bunch of great tips mixed in. Thank you sir!
This was a really good video, algorithm finally sent something good 👍👍
yup i am totally here for the shadows
Amazing tutorial. I will definitely try this in the near future, but I gotta make at least 3 cups of coffee for it.
its great to hear someone pronouncing z correctly
I think an easier way to control normals is through normal maps. Tangent maps for animated characters, object normal maps for movable objects and maybe world space for environments.
Height/Bump maps could be used as well for a more low fi method
Thanks for this tutorial, I will try it on my models
Super clear and comprehensive, thanks
This is a gold mine of information!
looks really good
nice and clear, the explanation is good! thank you!👍
You guys check a project called division of existence, it was done by blender. And the Shader was fully done in blender and seems to me they have the most advance knowledge on anime blender.. Considering the project was almost 6 years ago and the shading still is top.
This is just freaking amazing. Thank you soooooo much! It's just what I needed 🙌😁
Great video thanks for making this so much easier to understand!!!
It looks nice, but, likely only fit for stills due to the immediate jolt from light to dark, versus how it looks when you create 2D animation. It's worth attempting this with animation, as my initial thought is that the smooth animation, while 'stepped' shadows popping might not feel right.
15:55 Is there other solution for fixing the normals when animating? Because that is great inside blender but it doesnt work if you need to export to a game engine like Unity or Unreal :c
Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for this video.
This is really good!
Vertex Arcade, Thanks for sharing your wisdom
I thought this was another "Model/Sculpt an anime figure" tutorial, but it has some rare tuts others don't teach.
Ive got an idea similar to your metod, what if we bake normal map of the head, then just paint special zones with average color on the normal map?
At 05:5 the video uses a mirror modifier, but when i use it, it will duplicate my model, is there a way to edit simultaneously the vertex without duplicating the model?
Thank you so much for making this video.
Вау...
Просто вау.
Это видимо мне и нужно было все эт годы.
Спасибо!!!
I have seen some of the process on Twitter this is very good congrats!
Thank you for the wonderful video.
Nami you created is really cute and lovely.🥰
My question is, do you merge the separate face parts together in the end?
When I try to merge, the normals merge and create strange shadows.
I hope you can answer my question.
너무 너무 감사합니다!😀
Awesome as hell
Absolutely amazing! Thank you!
Amazing tutorial. Thanks so much
can you do a tutorial on how you made the hair please
Thanks for making this video
Thank you so much ! You are doing a tremendous job
what about if u animate it, the transition doesnt look that right, or is there a way? ill go wih more simplistic normals and the rest is texture or light maps
15:24 I explain how to animate here! In a game engine you would just have to make sure that you disable the Recalculation of Normals
@@VertexArcade ohhhh makes sence! thanks for sharing, gonna chek it out
aw nice npr
Nice tutorial,
just a question my character's head is already rigged and has multiple shape keys if I use knife tool to cut the face for shadows would it not break the shape keys and rig?
You can try it and see if it works, but usually this kind of shading would be done BEFORE you start animating your model
I'm wondering why not adjust the lighting per scene and bake onto the surface, shadow and all. Or just don't use lighting at all but model for the effect and simply use vectored zones. Either way works well.
How do you have the annotation bar that lets you access the notes and change the color of the annotation?
Liked and subscribed!
Tip, you don't have to do this topology method, you can just normal paint!
can you export these custom normals as a image so you can play with it on external software ?? i feel like that someone could make the transitions better than just fiddling with it on blender
2:24 how i create a new material there?
Isn’t there a map of the anime shading you can apply to the mesh without so much as making a mark or a cut
Yes, you could technically use an Object Space Normal map to force the different parts of the face to point in different directions, but that method would only apply to Blender because it happens in the shader. You would then have to set up a special shader in any other software/game engine to get it work. This method changes the normals for the faces so you can use it any software and the normals will stay this way
@@VertexArcade oh okay I’ll stick with blender. I feel like it’s a different chore to do in other software.
Also another question. That add on of yours. Does it automatically apply the lines on the mesh or would I still have to do it manually and it’s just only for the normals?
You still have to cut the lines, all it does is turn the Copying and Pasting Vector steps into a single button press
@@VertexArcade ohh
please someone help, i have error when I rotate normal direction from third mesh, referance(second) mesh's data tranfer modifier write that their topology do not match. But i changed only normal rotation and nothing else. How can i fix it?
what was inside the Texture node group at 2:25
Nothing important, that just has some textures in it, but I made it into a Node Group so that the Shader Editor wouldn't be messy with all of the Texture Coordinate and Mapping nodes
@@VertexArcade ah alright, so its just a simple base color with texture coordinate
@@VertexArcade I was following the tutorial, but I got stuck at this stage. :( I do have a texture applied to the model, so how can I add it? I noticed that when you opened the Shading Editor, it was already there.
Could a custom painted normal map do the same thing as well, or would that break when being animated?
Really cool.How would I transfer this perfect lit model transfer to Unreal Engine or Unity for games?
It's been a few years since I studied 3D, but I'm still a beginner.
Still, I had a lot of questions, so I was always looking for them, and thank you for making a good video that answered what I was really curious about.
I really have a question!
If you duplicate the original like that and give perfect toon shading through the vertex information value,
To create that effect, 'one flattened duplicate face and a sphere (for natural shading)' are these two objects kept in the 'hidden' state and continued to be used together with the original??? Sorry I'm a 3D beginner
Or bake? Would it be possible to use the same technique to permanently reflect that shading in the original and delete those two unnecessary ones?
where did you get nami from? rip it from odyssey?
I didn't personally rip it, I just searched for a Nami 3D model and found this one om DeviantArt!
Oooh I see, then I'm still a little confused by your mirror modifier, I'm guessing you just deleted one side to make it work then?
Yeah exactly, in Edit mode I just selected half of the mesh and deleted it
Wish it were that easy for league models lol
Well what you could do is isolate the face of a League model and then just do the mirror modifier on that instead of the whole body. Obviously it would depend on the character, but I'm sure most of them are symmetrical
Awesome but how would I use such a model in other software?
What if you turn the sun up and down, the shadow only goes from one side to a other
2:36 If you can't find the Shader to RGB node, you HAVE to be in EEVEE render mode.
Amazing work ! Thank you very much ! Have you tried to export your model in an other software to see if the normal work the same way ? Specially a game engine like unity or UE5?
Yeah, they definitely work in Unity, you just need to disable Normal Recalculation in the Mesh import settings. I haven't tried it in Unreal, but I'm sure the setting is somewhere
Helpful
How do I create a cell shaded transparent?
It's fantastic
threse no normal option in 4.2. anybody help
god sent
I'm curious. Some say don't use face data to a mesh that isn't it's exact same, but I want to use the normals aspect on a model that cannot have it's face edited (rigged) (otherwise I would have to import/export vertex and open close the bone to have the hundreds of shapekeys and vertex groups it has to still work). Is there a data transfer modifier setup that allows me to just transfer the data from edited normals face to a mesh with no normals edited?
What you could do is duplicate the model and apply the armature so that it isn't rigged anymore. You can then edit the normals for this mesh, and because it's exactly the same as the rigged mesh you can copy the normals like I showed in the video
too hard for my little brain but you explained well. 🤯😢😂😎👍🏽
does this work when you import to a game engine? I assume it does, but I cant test it now
The only question that remains is, and i think its the most importand, do they get to to export this to an Game Engine, like Unity 3D or Unreal?
Does it still work with rotating the light source up and down? Like if I wanted the character to be lit from below?
When fine tuning the normals you would just need to also rotate the sun up and down and then rotate the normals only along the X axis
Awesome tutorial! Thanks!
It's interesting that despite the advancements in technology, 3D programs still struggle to execute cel shading the way we want. Even with the cutting-edge tech available today (such as NVidia Omniverse AI, a powerful UE5 material system, many great addons, etc), achieving cel-shading that truly resembles 2D artwork remains challenging.
I mean, c'mon! With all this technology available, we still don't have a ready-to-go addon or similar?
I think it's because most graphics actively strive for photo-realism compared to hand drawn which requires a very different technical workflow. The normals for instance is due to the lighting not having cel rendering in mind. I've done some NPR work, I need to try this videos workflow when it comes to character modelling before I can say more on the subject.
@@Gear_Snack Agreed. All tech is aiming for realism.
Creating cel-shaded normals with Data Transfer works like a charm (smooth hi to low poly), but it's the animation stage where I go all-in, squeezing and warping body parts to bring that organic expressiveness to life. But wow, does it ever take it out of me (And it's boring -___- )
@@Amelia_PC True, because of the way rigging is set up, using squash and stretch is difficult which is a problem as it's a key principle in 2D animation.
I think it’s because a lot of time folks are going about things in the “wrong” or more difficult way. I think the easiest way to get cel shaded normals is to use either a tangent normal map or a height/bump map. That way you can intuitively control the shapes and you can achieve a higher resolution without a lot of geometry
@@chidorirasenganz I think the animation is the hardest part of recreating a 2D look. Even Arc System Works's animations, with their great work, still look 3D.
(I was trying to replicate the 90s cartoon flat color style, so I'm not dealing with shading now. Phew, one less headache )
can you show how to upload this in ue4 or ue5?
Really interesting video. I can definitely see it being feasible for a small scale project but anything bigger would be dragged down by how repetitive and time consuming this is. Unless you're really dedicated to having the perfect anime aesthetic or you work in a big team I wouldn't bother.
I still saved the video as this could perhaps be used for more than just faces, like helping direct the lighting on specific static props in the background for example.
Yeah it is somewhat time consuming but I've made so many of them now that I can probably finish one in about an hour or so, from start to finish. And you would only really do this style of custom normals for your main characters
Any idea how to use this method with shape keys?. When i deform the face of my character the custom normals gets distorted. I tried some data transfer to keep the custom normals on the shape key and it does transfer properly but when i go back to original shape the custom normals that previously were working fine now are broken.
EDIT - seems it works fine for you when u data transfer from the B face to A face. But for some reason when i do and i turn the value of the shape key to 1 the normals still break >_
The only problem is that this only works along the horizontal, how to you get good normals for both horizontal AND vertical light rotation.
Is this method allows to somehow export this shading setting to game engine (particularly Unity)? If no then is there a way to do this inside engine?
In Unity, in the Mesh options, you can set Recalculate Normals to None, so the normals won't be recalculated when the mesh changes
Okay, but if the model is being used for something like a game and is viewed from the side wont the faces be really flat? Like it looks great from the front but if you are looking at the same model from the side wont it look flat and weird?
No because changing the normals only changes the way shadows behave, it doesn't change the shape of the model. See the model at an angle at 14:00, it retains its shape at any angle while only the shadows change
@@EmiliyaS-fh1zj okay, because when he first flattened it all it looked like it made the model flat. Sorry, I'm a newb when it comes to modeling so I appreciate the explanation
I wish one day blender can make custom shadow by animation and AI calculation, we have animation down, now for smoother transition with AI😂
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing! I would like to put this into Unity, so in the "Fixing bad shading while animating" section, it looks like we need that other head as a reference for shading, would I need to hide that head somehow while having it in unity?
In Unity you can choose to disable the Recalculation of Normals in the model import settings! There should be a checkbox to disable normal recalculation, it's been a while since I've used Unity but the setting is there somewhere!
Just had a quick look and you need to change Blend Shape Normals from Calculate to None. I'm not sure how it would work with a rig with face bones, but you can definitely disable the shape key normal recalculation
@@VertexArcade thank you again for an amazing video! Really terrific explanations. Would this same idea apply in Unreal as it does in unity? (keeping the blender normal directions by telling it not to recalculate, normals, etc.)
Yeah it should, I haven't tried it in Unreal but I'm sure there's a setting somewhere to stop it from recalculating!
bro i got used to blender 3.6 and mostly some rigging addons that i use there that wont work in 4.0. It is posible to apply this technology on blender 3.6? or im forced to update version.
This technique will work with most versions of Blender! The 4.0 in the title is just to grab people's attention as it's the newest version!
@@VertexArcade my man~
How do you even figure this out brooo🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Dude, you just broke my brain! I just finished a character project in UE5 that is rendered in a BotW-styled cell shader and I kinda wish I had this tutorial when I was working on it. I got around it by animating the lights positions and intensity in UE5 but it's not fool-proof.
How would you transfer something like this in a game engine? Is this process software agnostic enough to do that?
Well hopefully for your next project this will be helpful! Yeah, these normals will transfer over to Game Engines but if you animate the face using Shape Keys you'll need to disable the Recalculation of Normals, and for armature face animation you'll need to do some research because I'm not sure how to do that