GodotCon Boston 2025 Anime Workshop

• Assets for the workshop are at https://github.com/codernunk/godotcon-anime-style-2025
• Arc System Works pioneered the anime 3D style with Guilty Gear Xrd
• Topology is more intentional and exaggerated on faces, to get the most out of animation and shadows
• More reliance on vertex painting and secondary texture maps to control shading instead of normal maps and bump maps
• Texture atlas technique
  • Since the art style relies on little detail, we can simplify texturing with atlas textures
  • A texture atlas is just a very small texture split into zones with flat colors
  • Place UVs in the parts of the texture with the colors you want
  • There is black padding between the colors in the example, because the paint bucket tool can bleed into other sections. The speaker feels that having a border helps avoid this issue.
• Using a Texture atlas
  • Switch to the Shading tab
    • Create a new material for the model
    • In the shader for the material, remove the Principled BSDF node by using the x or delete keys
      • Principled BSDF node is used for realistic rendering
    • shift+a, then search for Image Texture and add that
    • Connect Color to Surface on the Material Output. The model should be black now.
  • Switch to UV Editing
    • Browse image to be linked in the left panel.
    • Change Viewport Shading to Solid, then change the Color to Texture in the right panel.
    • Might have to use scroll wheel on the bar to see the Viewport Shading option.
    • Hover over hands and face, and press l on each to select all of the linked vertexes.
    • Press u in the right panel, pick any of the three uv unwrap options.
    • Press s in the left panel to scale the UVs down until they fit in one of the color boxes.
    • Press g in the left panel to move the UVs into the desire color box.
    • Press 3 to switching to face selection mode, pressing l in this mode lets you select all of the faces that are linked without crossing seams
    • You can mark seams with u when you have a loop selected.
• Shadows
  • Switch to the Shading tab
    • We're going to make the toon shader now.
    • Specifically, an important part of the shader is the color ramp node with Constant interpolation. We use this to make hard shadows.
    • Add a Diffuse BSDF to get some basic lighting information
    • Add a Shader to RGB node
    • Connect the BSDF to Shader on the Shader
    • Connect Color on the Shader to RGB to Fac on the Color Ramp
    • Add a Mix node
    • Connect Color on the Color Ramp to Factor on the Mix
    • Change A on the Mix to Black (or any other color you want to use for shadows)
    • Connect Color on the Texture node to B on the Mix
    • Connect Result on the Mix to Surface on the Material Output
    • We can color the shadows by using HSV adjustment
      • Add a Hue/Saturation/Value node
      • Set it to 0.5 Hue, 2 Saturation, and .8 Value
      • Connect Color on the Texture node to Color on the Hue/Saturation/Value
      • Connect Color on the Hue/Saturation/Value to A on the Mix
    • There are a lot of ways to color shadows; we could also use a dedicated shadow texture for example.
• Outlines
  • Could use Inverted Hull for outlines. It's not perfect; other options include stencil shaders.
  • Switch to the Layout tab
    • Add a new material, change it to the emission texture, set the color to black, enable backface culling camera
    • Add the Solidify modifier in Blender, 0.003 Thickness, 1.0 Offset
    • Flip normals, change thickness, set the material offset to 1
    • The outlines on the face look bad, but by using weight painting to control the thickness of the Solidifier modifier.
    • Create a new vertex group and change the vertex group of the Solidifier modifier
    • Now you can change the weights on the model
• Editing face normals
  • Some shadows are on the face, but it doesn't look good.
  • Add a sphere, set to smooth shading
  • Add a modifier to data transfer, so we use the normals of the sphere for the face.
• Exporting to Godot
  • We don't want to export the outline, because it breaks compatibility with shape keys if we want to use them.
  • Instead, we need to write the outline shader in Godot to pull the weights from the model data.
  • We can store data in the vertex colors (R for outline weight and G for custom shadow)