Blender's eevee viewport can help you decide the look of your next toon shaded project. We will review the #GuiltyGear shading covering all you need to know to recreate the look in #realtime using #Blender's eevee viewport. I will guide you from the Softimage techniques in which the original game was created all the way into adopting those techniques with Blender.
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Presentation
Toon shading is my passion. I started reading Japanese blogs with Softimage toon shaders in Y2K, and I haven´t stopped since. Today on Schiller's tips I´ll go into a deep review using Softimage and Blender to recreate the Guilty Gear toon shading style.
This video is but a short version of the analysis for the technique in the game. So If you´re interested in getting the full 1h video, I´ll leave the link in the description below.
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All right, so let's get into all the tech core that will help you achieve better artistic-driven stylized toon shading on Eevee's viewport.
Breakdown of a toon shader
The core on a toon shader is to define 3 basic passes: The flat shade color, the Shadow color and the outline color. There are other passes created for highlight control, Normal pass useful for relighting a character, a ramp pass and also the outline.
When I construct my toon shading I follow what japanese animation companies have done for years: using separated render passes to work stylization on post-production with a compositor like After Effects. You can also work on the open source compositor Natron. Click here to know more about combining Blender and Natron>>. Combining layers with different modes and opacity yield better results in post production for toon shading.
I want to address what really makes and breaks the Guilty Gear toon shading style.
Basically what this means is that the developers of the game used a High polygonal model for the HEAD and FACE only for CINEMATICS while using the same mid-poly body. When the gaming mechanics start the fight, the head model is then switched to a low poly head since it doesn't require the extra polygons at camera distance. Pure genius!
On this video we will also cover other aspects that were not presented on the GDC on that year.
Game Developer Conference on 2015
Let's start at the beginning:
The GDC of 2015 regarding Guilty Gear covered basic aspects of the style in Softimage. Unfortunately for the world Softimage was shut down in March early that year. You gotta now that Softimage has been one of the top choices for Konami and other Japanese companies for videogame development. Even Street Fighter 4 was created using Softimage.
The hardcore secret to toon shading is to have control defining the mask to let the light affect the surface. You can change the normals or you can use occlusion methods to define light and shadows in your texture. Controling the vertex normals is key.
This is the Softimage viewport using realtime shaders compiled, and it inputs a base texture and a shadow texture named "Sub shadow surface (SSS)" in the shader in multiply mode against the base color texture. You can also see they are multiplying the internal lines against the base color. This makes up for the basic shader.
Great news is that Blender can do that too, so let´s find out how.
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Creating toon style through PASSES in post-production
This section will explore the principles of constructing a toon shader using PASSES first, so we will port that knowledge later onto other softwares or viewports.
This robot was created for a videogame in Unreal Engine and will set a practical example for the things Guilty Gear does. The perfect opportunity to test the same environment between softimage and Unreal. So we see a rim light pass and then a flat color pass on the render which shows 1 level highlight and 2 level shadows.
The texture was composed in Photoshop using a reference for the LIGHT part. Then I placed a purple solid layer to multiply to 80% to darken the same texture. I flattened the art, and exported both Light and Dark textures. The Toon Paint and Host shader in Softimage allows me to add a highlight automatically and I can compose it on different blending modes. I even have a "softness" parameter to work with a less intense shadow.
Another Key component to stylize the shader is also ANIMATION, because the way the body reacts and moves, the more the shader needs to be easier to read with internal lines, decals, and highlights, since this was a robot.
Let´s see how the light direction affects the normals and the shading. Also, let´s hide that point light and notice the point light stopped adding more lights into highlight since now it´s not present on the scene.
Smear frames and Effects
Another topic we will address in stylization is effects. Here, the robot will turn itself into a Ball. The way we do this is by creating a sphere, parenting it to the pelvis of the Robot since he´s going to roll by animation starting in his belly. Also the texture for the robot's attack will reflect the "rolling" in the toon texture with speedlines.
The sphere is scaled from 0 to 40% in 2 frames. The ball surrounds the 3d robot body.
I am using my own experience and example on this model from Softimage in hopes that all what we will do later on Blender will illustrate the basic setups you´ll need to create for your own toon shading setup.
Here you can see the flat texture of the robot ball. We also created an emission texture. This is how it looked on Unreal. As you can see the UVs is a simple sphere. Guilty Gear is full of simple meshes projected into 2D for special effects in their cinematics.
Here´s a simple idea how to achieve that.
You can also create morph shapes and store them for quick exaggeration. All though as a general rule it´s always best to deform (scale) bones than running with a shape animated character. I personally like to test all my options.
All right, up to this point, we have constructed a simple toon shader using the toon shader node in Softimage to test our points. So lets put that into practice with Elphelt. We can already see the 2 levels of shadows and the highlight.
More over we notice that the AMBIENCE value of the scene is affecting the shader with OVERLAY mix mode.
And we have other common mix modes to affect the overall color of the character. You can also see how changing the light affects the face. We need to check out if the face has edited normals.
Defining normals for the 3d face
One very important thing to notice is that all character designs for closer animation have an almost flat face that ensures the light will definitely hit the surface at a straight angle. If you mark HARD EDGES on the edges of the jaw for example, you´re changing the value of the normals on the poly faces. In addition: marking hard edges as well as editing other high difference angles between normals will yield harder breaks on the facial lighting.
In Softimage there are tools to edit the normals. This is an addon that can bend the direction of the selected normal directions, either by keying the number in positive or negative XYZ. See for yourself.
My Name is Pierre Schiller. I´m a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer, and I want to thank you for watching this video. If you got questions, reach me through social links in the description below. Don't forget you can get the complete video and assets on my Gumroad.
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