Anime Shader (Potential Breakthrough-)
Added 2021-03-07 08:41:57 +0000 UTCSo, up to this point, my biggest problem with Anime shading was the normal shadow editing process. I spent weeks trying to learn to do it, and in the end it looked "kinda OK", but we ended up paying a professional a few hundred bucks to do it correctly. Even for a professional, it took her almost a week to completely edit the normal shadows for 1 character face.
For me, this was a pretty big deal breaker, because in the 48 straight hours of work it takes to wrestle with face normals, you could have sculpted and probably textured 2 entire photorealistic characters - So, Anime shading wasn't looking very reasonable for anyone who wanted to create characters quickly.
HOWEVER, Fravik, an awesome Squad member here informed me that the toon shader we just bought comes with an "auto-smooth-normal" feature.............. Now, it's not gonna look as good as the Manual Normals like they do in Guilty Gear, but If I had to describe the quality difference: If Guilty Gear Normal Editing is 100% good looking anime, this auto-smooth normal feature is an 85%. However, the trade-off is instead of wrestling with face shadows for 48 hours, it takes about 60 seconds - So, I guess it just depends on how badly you want that last 15% of aesthetic - BUT, this is huge! Possibly make Anime shading viable for us, we'll see in about a week when we try this on Exa :)
Special thanks to Fravik! Thanks for sharing this feature!!!
