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Research
Primary Research
Audince
My target audience will be for car enthusiasts. Which are around the adults and teenagers who has a intreast of cars. They are also into the anime inspired visuals. The age group is very active online and spend a lot of time on social media such as YouTube and Twitter/X. My target audience overview is for those that like cars and can be portrayed in a anime style animation . Using a mixture of both worlds realism on cars but the visual appearance of anime.My target audience overview is for those that like cars and can be portrayed in a anime style animation . Using a mixture of both worlds realism on cars but the visual appearance of anime.
Unit8-Form
Unit8-FormAns
In my forms I found out that my target audience…
Someone driving my own car
After doing a risk plan we found out that me driving the car in a unknown area could lead to more hazards and dangerous. Therefore, my father decided to drive whist my mum recorded. The way of recording was that the phone was directly on the dashboard allowing the phone to pick up each bump and to have a greater idea on how suspension works on the car.
Although my car is a automatic hybrid and was produced in 2025 meaning it is newer and has different technologies for the car suspension it still is able to give me a foundation to how I can manage suspension in my trailer. Having this footage also allows me to get a greater idea of the location with things such as pot holes.
There are significant differences within the cars themselves for example the mustang boss is a rear wheel drive as well as the MX whereas, mine is a front real drive. They are by different year gaps and manufactures so again they use new technologies. However, with my secondary support of Forza Motorsport 4 I will be able to get a greater feel.
Secondary Research
Visuals
For my visuals I have decided to go with a cel shader this this because I am very passionate about the anime look. This is because I am very formila with how it looks and the ways of achieving it based on previous works. I feel like the cel shader also express more emotion than regular lighting because of the tones used for the story telling.
A cel shader (also known as toon shading) is a way to give a hand drawn look. Instead of smooth gradients and realistic lighting. A cel shader usually contain different bands which often is good for lighting direction. There are many different types of cel shading from stylised from titles like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker or the anime games such as Dragon Ball FighterZ. Each has their own unquiet style not just within games but in movies to.
This is a cel shader made with blender 4.2. Although this isn’t unreal engine which is what the animation will be taking place in. This was inspired by Persona 3 Reload which was created in unreal engine 4. However, due to it being open sourced I can have a look at the project and try to translate it to Unreal engine again.
I took inspiration from the GDC talk about how guilty gear managed to achieve their cel shading this is because I believe this is a very polished anime look which I want to recreate. When I looked into the cel shading on YouTube around 90% was post processed material however, I think gilty gear gives better lines and more control. Whereas, post process happends when realistic lighting has been applied and you get a splogy gredient which would ruin the style.
Guilty gear has achieved the art style already by having different camera angles within battle. These types of camera angles will be good for the cinematic idea. Creating the anime style in 3D scenes can help create a innovative story telling this is because you can capture more emotion and expression.
Cel shading is quite hard to get right this is because there is no middle ground between and if it is too inconstant it can very easily be ruined which has happens numerous times before. It is also hard to show a replicated 2D style in 3D. An anime called RWBY is one of the most popular 3D anime however, I still believe that there is still ground to explore.
How to create a cel shader
The cel shader contain 3 main components.
- Threshold – This is the the point between the shadow value and the light value creating the highlights of the shadow.
- Light vector – This is the direction of which the light is coming from. This will work along the side of the threshold as if that threshold is met then shadow highlight will show.
- Normal vector – This is often the way that the faces are facing as seen in the example image above.
However, a cel shader is very dependent on lighting without good lighting your cel shader will suck. There is no global lighting effecting the characters meaning each character has their own point light in order to best convey the light vector. The light is also adjusted for each cut scene. However, I will not be adding singular light per character and will instead use a global light in a smart way as mentioned in my research about lighting later.
Vertex normal are very different to face normal. A lot of 3D modelling engines have tools to work the vertex normal out however, this is often for realism and not cel shading. Also Guilty Gear got the effect by setting them manually which is time consuming. Therefore, I will be using normal maps as they are more piratical however, there will be less control.
Color in anime is treated in away to express different emotions and moods giving a pathetic fallacy feel. The combination between the light and shadow vectors create a way of expressing the character or model. Anime also priorities the foreground and tend to make the background less detailed.
So how is color achieved? Color is often done by the unwrapped model and applying the colors needed in a flat shaded way. Before becoming cel shaded. They multiply 2 textures together allowing more control over the shadow.
Outline can be split into 2 categories. One is the outside outline which often uses a inverted hull method which is flipping your entire mesh inside out which is a poorly optimized way of doing it. However, it gives you more control than using post processing. Post processing is a less controlled way however, is more optimized. However, I will still use the inverted hull method this is because I will have more control as we have already changed a few parts of the method this is one part which I don’t want to change. The next outline method is that inner outline. This is again controlled via textures or can be done manually which is very hard to do. Adding a inner outline adds diversity
After doing a few attempts in with my cel shader I decided to go into further details about a cel shader as I wasn’t hitting the look that I wanted. It felt like I was missing something therefore, I decided to do further research. I felt that my first attempt was closer than my recent attempts people also noticed this difference.
In this tutorial he uses post processing which was mentioned during the GDC however, for the same reasons of Guilty gear avoiding it however, this does make a good contingency plan for if something was to go wrong. As this goes into a lot of detail on how to get the look.
Throughout my research I managed to stumble on a car anime by the official Toyota group which looks very cool. Looking at this art style on their cars it made me relise that Post process might be the way to go as it is more adaptive as well. Which is something I struggled to get right on this one. The Toyota anime GRIP looks a lot more stodgy than having a hard coded shader. I will now be using post processing which will give me less control on the overall shader. But this will be a plan B if the technique is too hard to use.
Let’s break down how the car looks. Based on how the lighting is made we can see how it is interacting with shadows and the overall look. You can see that the car is a mostly solid color but feels less metallic. There is no outline on the car we can see that the shadows are more splodge. We can see it still features a hand drawn element. Instead of hard two-tone shadows it has a smooth gradient between light and darker elements. It has very basic environment shading.
This is from initial d. It features a more well known anime 1990s look. It has a outline however, it doesn’t engolf the entire car it is mostly to show detail. The car feels more metalic and less flat. The shader is less reflective than GRIP as well.
Previous works
I have got some expirence making a cel shader as I teamed up with my friend Josh in order to create this very off Simptions look. This was from a older project from last year (cel shader) and therefore, I am a little rusty on the techniques that was applied. But overall I think I can make a better looking cel shader which is more directed at the anime genre.
Lighting
Another GDC which will impact my game is that of Forza Horizon 3. This is because of their technology in order to create the sky within the game. Although this focuses more on the realism I can still focus on the lighting how it can effect the environment.
When doing research on the car commercials I relised that they featured different times of days which I thought was a cool idea. My original thought was to use a video however, there are many disadvantages of this.
Going to the location to capture real time lighting and how it effects the world around it will add to the realism of how the world should look but with the twist of the cel shader. This would consume a lot of time and require data processing. I managed to find a resource which I could use which contained high detailed HDR. Therefore, I will be using that in my production. This method will be more limiting as I won’t be able to use many of their techniques but the idea is much the same. I still plan on using motion however, in a different method.
If I am to use a custom HDR I would like to present the shadows in a also very realistic way this is done by getting a scrolling texture which can show cloud reflections on model adding to that realistic look.
I didn’t get too much information from it unlike the cel shader this is because although lighting is relevant and this has given me ideas for my lighting and how to do it this will still require trial and error.
Previous works
I have had a play with lighting once before however, it didn’t look to great this is because my understanding of it isn’t great and there are huge gaps within my knowledge. I understood the basics but couldn’t come up with a good way of doing it. However, with this new understanding of lighting I will be able to do better.
Fast & Furious as 10 movies with a 11 in development releasing in 2028. In order for me to understand what makes a good car trailer I have decided to take a dive into the film series. However, I haven’t got a large amount of time to watch each induvial therefore, I decided to watch the top 3 IMDb rating. Understanding the different shots and how they were used in the car scenes. As it will also let me reach my audience reception. For each movie I will also look at the reviews to try and understand why the ratings average around 7.
Forza Motorsport 4
I was away when making this game play teaser for my primary research of going to the location. In my MX5 game play. I had a feel for the controls and looking at how the AI was competing against me. There are gameplay bugs but I made do.