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.

Years of searching good anime shadow methods and this is the first tutorial that explains everything smoothly. Thanks!

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.

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!

your normal editing add-on is the best christmas gift I've ever recieved bro XD CANT THX YOU ENOUGH FOR THIS!

What an incredible way to approach a solution to a problem. Great work.

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.

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.

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

Good method with a high level of control and a bunch of great tips mixed in. Thank you sir!

Very informative, makes so much more sense on how to approach after these explanations.

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!

This is just freaking amazing. Thank you soooooo much! It's just what I needed 🙌😁

In just 17 min wow. This is is a goldmine of information. Thank you soo much!

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!

Super clear and comprehensive, thanks

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 the best anime toon shading tutorial i've ever seen

nice and clear, the explanation is good! thank you!👍

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for this video.

This is a gold mine of information!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS I WAS WAITING FOR THIIIIIS

I've seen this done before, but your video was _much_ easier to follow.

Absolutely amazing! Thank you!

Thank you so much for sharing this! Now I see a chance to learn how to edit those ****normals.. Great video!

Thanks for this tutorial, I will try it on my models

This was a really good video, algorithm finally sent something good 👍👍

Awesome as hell

Amazing tutorial. Thanks so much

Thank you so much ! You are doing a tremendous job

Great video thanks for making this so much easier to understand!!!

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.

Вау... Просто вау. Это видимо мне и нужно было все эт годы. Спасибо!!!

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❤❤

Thank you so much for making this video.

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.💯

yup i am totally here for the shadows

This is pretty impressive, thanks for uploading! I’ve been meaning to try out toon shading but like you said, it’s pretty painful.

Amazing tutorial. I will definitely try this in the near future, but I gotta make at least 3 cups of coffee for it.

Thanks for making this video

very useful tut... .thanks....

It's fantastic

Vertex Arcade, Thanks for sharing your wisdom

Liked and subscribed!

aw nice npr

its great to hear someone pronouncing z correctly

This is actually an expensive trick, so I'm holding onto this method. Certain indie groups value this method a great deal

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.

god sent

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?

I have seen some of the process on Twitter this is very good congrats!

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.

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

I thought this was another "Model/Sculpt an anime figure" tutorial, but it has some rare tuts others don't teach.

Hope you make a tutorial on making a Toon Shader for Blender 4.0

Really cool.How would I transfer this perfect lit model transfer to Unreal Engine or Unity for games?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Could a custom painted normal map do the same thing as well, or would that break when being animated?

If there is an addon then pls make one tutorial on that for toon shading, like you say Abnormal addon

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.

can you do a tutorial on how you made the hair please

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?

Awesome but how would I use such a model in other software?

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?

Does it still work with rotating the light source up and down? Like if I wanted the character to be lit from below?

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?

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 >_

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

does this work when you import to a game engine? I assume it does, but I cant test it now

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/

How do you even figure this out brooo🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

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?

I wish one day blender can make custom shadow by animation and AI calculation, we have animation down, now for smoother transition with AI😂

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 show how to upload this in ue4 or ue5?

What if you turn the sun up and down, the shadow only goes from one side to a other

Gulty gear strife is a great case of study

How do I create a cell shaded transparent?

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.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="144">2:24</a> how i create a new material there?

Me watching knowing I won't use any of this great knowledge because I don't have blender 🍿

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

I like Dorohedoro

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?

The only problem is that this only works along the horizontal, how to you get good normals for both horizontal AND vertical light rotation.

what was inside the Texture node group at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="145">2:25</a>

where did you get nami from? rip it from odyssey?

Would this work on vroid models?

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="155">2:35</a> Did you just say "shader to orgy-b node"? 😂 Anyways, great tutorial.

if anyone is having shadows issues just disable shadows from the sun

can add this model in gmod

Does this method also apply to vroid or 3D vtuber?

You need to produce an instructional course on the process you use for anime. This and your shape key selector are get tools. I would love to see how you would integrate them, and use these techniques for animated scene.

Was auto smooth removed from blender?

Couldn't you just use the original head Mesh instead of a sphere for the transitions?

those who wanted to see Nami ONLY

The problem with this is that its to performence intensive also is only working inside blender. Also changing the normals from there default will mean that shadow does not align with shading. if it works for you it works for you. but there are some pretty big downsides to adjusting the normals like that.