Today we will tell you in a nutshell about what cell shading is, how it makes the work of animators easier and at the same time simplifies and complicates it for third-generation artists, and also increases the cost of new “flat” cartoons and makes games cheaper.
I think it’s not difficult to find out how to simulate volume on a plane – on the Internet you can find many articles on the topic of drawing shadows and highlights, as well as normal maps and display maps. If it’s not enough or you want to know more, let us know in the comments, we will definitely share our secrets with you. But how to make a flat one out of a three-dimensional one is an interesting question. Or rather, very practical.
Part 1. What is celshading?
(Or cel-shading, as you like)
Cell shading is a special way of stylizing a three-dimensional or live action image (shot with real people). To obtain it, they use a variety of hardware and software tricks, the essence of which boils down to obtaining one result – obtaining a picture with sharp color and shadow transitions, imitating a drawn classic cartoon, like Disney 60-80 (for the modern generation, a comparison with classic anime is probably closer) . Essentially, it should look like this.
By the way, the presence of an outline (an outline line that separates characters, objects and clothing from the background) is completely optional, but it occurs quite often.
The term cell shading itself has a somewhat vague origin, because… 10 years ago there were many analogues: toon shading (from cartoon), anime/manga shading, simple shading, strong shadow effect and others. And even now there is no consensus in tri-tech circles, only recently the cell shading option has become more or less widespread.
Demonstration of cell shading settings on the Unity engine from the Unity forum
Cell shading most likely goes back to the word cellular, which in different parsing options is translated as cellular – celluloid (a special material for drawing cartoons), paper (imitation of drawn cartoons of the last century) and as cellular – cellular, painted in a cage, cell (cellular structure of painting and delineation of the image with aulines). It is unknown which of the options is correct, but both perfectly describe the essence of the effect.
Part 2. Where is cel shading used?
First of all, these are cartoons for the little ones. Disney has improved significantly in rendering materials like leather and fabric, but the eye of the average child under 8-10 years old does not pay attention to such trifles (for psychophysiological reasons). It is easier for him to perceive images with contrasting colors, characters outlined with a thick boundary line, no frightening shadows at all or with minimal symbolic shadows. This is strange to hear for adults, but this is how the brain works. If you are curious to know more about this, then it is better to take a textbook on developmental physiology and psychology for universities, do not take popular books – a lot of things are missed there.
Disney’s cult classic sets the tone. Or rather, toon
And for the little ones, Disney (and Russian studios) produce cartoons with almost no shadows and smooth transitions (remember ponies, fixies or Smeshariki, damn them). Yes, this is not a rule, but it is a pattern of adaptation for the audience. By the way, the Atlantis cartoon, widely known in narrow circles, also used cel-shading when fitting models of prehistoric and modern technology.
Our cartoons also have cel-shading. At least for some episodes of “The Fixies”, at most… for “Children vs. Wizards”, but it’s better not to remember this shame.
But adaptation is not the only thing cel-shading is used for.
Those who follow the anime industry have probably noticed how the quality of drawing and the number of frames when the characters move has jumped.
So, for example, good examples of the successful use of celshading in anime are some films from the “Apple Seed” series, the “Land of Gems” series, “RWBY” (although this is not an anime, but an American cartoon in the style anime), “Kaguya-sama” (which became meme-worthy due to its amazing Tiki dance), “Demon Slayer” (where it is very difficult to distinguish between the rendered 2D and 3D parts), “Persona”, “Breakish Beasts” (although I I’m not sure if this is an anime) and some others.
Above: Outstanding Beasts. Below is Lady Kaguya. Some particularly ardent fans, by the way, do not believe that it is 3D, even when you show them convincing evidence.
Among the slightly less successful ones are “Berserk 2016”, “Attack on Titan” (titans and buildings often “fall out” from the rest of the frame, although the background for the last series was clearly improved by some models and frankly overlooked others), old versions of “Apple Seed” and many others, thousands of them.
Berserk, with its clumsy animation and falling out models, became a meme even in the year of its release:
In addition, 3D was partially used for rendering backgrounds and equipment in many other anime – “Ergo Proxy”, “Evangelion”, “Code Geass”, some moments in the film “Paprika”, “Beloved in the Franxx”, “Gundam 00”, “Empire of Corpses”, “Parasite” (latest episodes), “Akudama Drive”, “No Game – No Life”, “Ghost in the Shell” and many many others.
In “Ergo Proxy,” weapons, vehicles, general shots of cities under a dome, as well as some robots and backgrounds with a technocratic component were in focus. The other part of the backgrounds are cel-shaded photographs.
In general, quite often now anime uses 3D graphics not entirely, but to create backdrops (backgrounds), background characters (crowd characters that create fuss in the background), architecture and technology (which is physically more difficult to draw manually), including BChR and ordinary cars. Moreover, today finding an anime without 3D at all is more difficult than finding a completely 3D anime 🙂
Why celshading in anime? Unlike Disney cartoons, anime has a wider audience – there is content for children, teenagers, and mature adults. In other words, celshading here is not an adaptation to the age of the viewer. But then why, if such masterpieces as “Gantz O” and “Apple Seeds: Project Alpha” look good even without cel-shading?
In general, the term Anime has no genre, stylistic or age reference – it is any Asian animation, mainly made in Japan. It’s just that in the minds of our compatriots these are Japanese cartoons about girls with big eyes.
Apparently there are several goals here. Firstly, simplifying the work, which we will discuss below. Secondly, it is a tribute to tradition, which is very important in the context of Japanese culture.
There are other films and cartoons with cel-shading. From the old one – the cartoon “The Lord of the Rings” with rotoscoping (contrast turned up to maximum) and the application of hand-drawn effects – not quite cel-shading, but essentially close.
“A Scanner Darkly”, 2006. Live action film with cel-shading.
Relatively new ones include the film “A Scanner Darkly” and “Van Gogh. With love, Vincent.” Here, cel-shading turns live motion shooting into surreal horror, from which you can sometimes catch the effect of the “Dark Valley” (or a laugh), which only plays into the hands of the film.
Van Gogh. Love, Vincent
Not quite cel, but shading.
In addition, many have at least heard about the Arcane series (3D with stylization with cel-shading elements), as well as about some projects from the anthology “Love, Death and Robots”. Well, the younger generation is probably closer to some kind of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” or “Batman Ninja”. And, of course, cel-shading often appears in games.
Part 3. To be lazy is to set a trend
Initially, stylization in games was invented not so much to create an atmosphere, but to simplify the work of the computer or console on which the game should run. Or rather, it was impossible to do anything differently – textures were a luxury, and therefore all the models were low-poly and more or less monochromatic.
Then technology advanced, and stylization began to be used to create an atmosphere or to simplify the work of modelers in small studios – back then 3D scanning tools were rare, and not every studio could afford a computer powerful enough to bake 4K textures.
Nowadays, few games care about what hardware it will be launched on. However, many studios still strive to reduce the cost of money and man hours to a minimum, and therefore, by hook or by crook, they reduce the complexity of the process of creating games. Some use motion and facial expression capture instead of drawing hours of animation for the main character, some use poorly optimized megascans instead of piecing together game scenes, and some use cel-shading to avoid drawing decent textures.
The creators of the next iteration of the adventures of the elf named Link in the “Legends of Zelda” series thought about the same thing. Of course, the game had never attempted realism before, but before that the developers limited themselves to only smoothed textures and relatively low detail of the models. Now, most objects and heroes are almost devoid of texture detail (with rare exceptions in the form of stones, wooden boxes and talismans), instead everything is completely processed by celshader.
It is possible that the unprecedented success of the game “Genshine Impact” and its sister “Honkai Impact” contributed to the spread of celshading. Anime style, combined with good animation and high-quality cel-shading, compensated for the frankly secondary (or rather, tertiary) plot and casual gameplay (which can also be set to auto-complete quests and battles, so the player is not really needed – the game is itself plays, acting as an interactive cartoon).
The quality of the picture in “impact” is so good that shaders for various 3D programs that simulate the picture in these games are even sold on the Internet.
A shader designed for impact at an exorbitant price)))
Part 4. Technical side of the issue
It would be better to talk about this at the very beginning of the post. But then more than half of the readers would not have lived to get to this point. However, those who are not going to study this issue deeper can safely move to the end.
Shader (shader – shading, color transition, shine) is a fragment of a program (code), an independent program or a script (an executable procedural algorithm within a program) intended for execution by graphic processors in order to process an image. Those who work a lot with Photoshop or any other 2D and 3D program have at least heard of, and at most, often used shaders.
Each 3D program has its own set of shaders to customize the display of the model. Somewhere the basic set of add-ons is built-in (Keyshot, Zbrush), somewhere you need to download it separately, and somewhere you even need to buy it for a tidy sum (as, for example, for DAZ 3D and Arnold render for 3Ds max).
A basic set of toon shaders in Keyshot
Of the easier (in terms of hardware requirements and development) programs, celshading can be tried in MikuMikuDance (on its basis, by the way, many fan short films and clips for songs of Vocaloids program singers are created), XNAlara (originally software for testing models early versions of the Tomb Raider games and creating fan content), Blender 3D (although it has a certain barrier to entry) and Sculptris, although it does not have real cel-shading, but an imitation of it.
Cellshader in Blender
To create a shader, you need to have a good understanding of both programming (at least at a basic level) and visualization of 3D models and render settings. However, modern 3D programs and some game engines have a system of blueprints and nodes, which greatly simplify both programming elements (instead of writing lines of code, you are provided with a set of blocks and markers) and visualization settings.
Impact shader node tree in Blender. Screenshot from the shader’s art station.
This is where the work of 3D designers and programmers becomes more complicated – it is impossible to make a universal, high-quality celshader, just as it is impossible to drag shaders from one program to another. So for each program, for each game or cartoon, you need to re-create and configure your own celshader, which is more suitable for your program/game/cartoon and creates the least amount of “artifacts” during rendering.
Conclusion
So, today we introduced you a little to what celshading is, where it is found and why it is needed at all.
