Making "Anime" Posters Look Better

In this guide I want to share some advice on how to potentially improve renders involving cartoon/anime-stylized characters.

Introduction

The most common problem people struggle with while making renders involving anime/cartoon-stylized characters seems to be the way they tend to look in Source lighting (which is often not good at all). As someone who has been making Persona-dedicated posters for over two years now, I decided to write this guide that will go over some steps on how to deal with this issue, and, hopefully, help you make your renders look better.

Step 1: Lights ON vs Lights OFF & getting the best of the two worlds

The information I'm going to cover in this part is what inspired me to write this guide to begin with. Let's imagine you're done with building the scene and posing characters. But, try as you might, something still looks off...



Well, actually, you don't have need to look too hard to notice what is wrong here. If anything, you can probably point out several problems in this picture, but most of all, it's the way shadows lay on characters' faces. The severity of the issue may depend on your own skill of working with the lighting, but from my experience I can tell that most of the times it will still be there to varying extent.


So how do you deal with it? Let's start with disabling the lighting first. Right-click on the screen and remove the mark from "Enable lighting" option from the drop-down menu. You might also want to use 'mat_phong 0' command in the console to get rid of the plastic shining effect on the edges of the model. Here's the approximate result of our actions so far:



Even though Steam's file limitations forced me use compressed versions of the images, it's very noticable just how much more natural the characters started to look with lighting disabled.

Let's do another, more direct comparison real quick:



Looking at Yukari's mouth, nose and eyes in particular in the left picture, you can easily tell that this model wasn't suited to work within the lighting/shader system SFM has.

Now, let me adress two fair counterarguments that may have already come to your mind:

• First, disabling the lighting undoubtedly leads to the picture looking much flatter due to the absence of any kinds of shadows other besides pre-baked ones drawn into the texture.
  
  
• Second, with lighting disabled you no longer have acess to, well, the lights and all other benefits that come with them other than shadows.

Naturally, these two are closely interconnected, but I'm going to adress the first point more thoroughly in the part dedicated to cel-shading, while the second one I'm going to talk about right away.

Thankfully, there is a way to benifit from all the positives that having lighting both enabled and disabled provides. However, it requires Adobe Photoshop, GIMP or any other graphic editor that comes with an option to work with layers, so make sure you have one installed first.



The image above is an example of quite literally combining a "normal" render with the one where you disabled the lighting, as well as some additional editing that I'll cover in other parts of the guide.

For now, let's take a look on how to properly merge two renders into one step by step using another example.

1. First, prepare two renders like these:




2. Next, let's put one over the other. Unless you edited one of the images, they should usually allign as it is, but make sure of it just in case.










3. Now we need to erase the parts of the top layer that we want to improve (usually it's characters' faces, but it doesn't have to be just that). To make the lower layer blend with the top one, we need to adjust its hue/saturation as well as potentially make use of other tools.







4. After tinkering with colors and what not, we should get something like this. Sometimes it may be easier to pull off depending on the complexity of lighting you're going for. It may not look perfect (like here), but we're also not quite done yet. Let's add cel shading and some outlines into the mix.







5. Voila! I think this looks miles better than what we had initially and it wasn't all that difficult or time consuming to achieve either.









And here's the end result of this whole endeavour:




As far as this whole method goes, there's another way of handling things, which is to ignore SFM lighting altogether and let cel shading do all the heavy lifting.

Once again, in my own experience, this works just fine for brightly lit scenes or the ones where you use some kind of abstract background, like these:



...And even more complex renders, provided that you play around with color correction tools first.

Step 2: Cel-shading is cool and awesome

To put it in simple terms, cel shading allows us to get more stylized and sharper shadows, which is exactly what we need (in most cases) when we're working with anime/cartoony models. I probably don't need to sing praises to this technique too much, as I believe its benefits should be self-evident at this point:



While programs like Blender can achieve similar result automatically with just few presses of a button, for us SFM users it's more of a manual process. Naturally, this leads to a more time consuming work process, however, it also means we have much more control over how it will look, which is a good thing.

I won't go into too much detail in this section, as cel-shading as a topic has already been covered widely and informative enough by other people. Thus, I strongly recommend to check out the guide by Kooshλ Kλrimi or the original video by SK_Form it was based on:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789353069
https://youtu.be/mCbrYIqA-1s?si=Mbq8wo8CDH7uddsS
Both of these are quite lengthy, but it's quite easy to set up once you know what to do and you can even skip some of the steps that you may find not all that necessary for your work.


That being said, I don't like reducing this section to "lol, look at the other guides", so let's briefly (as reasonably possible) go over the main steps on how to achieve decent looking cel shading effect.

1. First, get these two mods from the workshop:
Hugevoid map provides us with a massive empty space, which is incredibely useful for all sorts of scenebuilds, but more importantly it doesn't have any map lighting (and we don't want it to make cel shading work).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2643240491
Greenscreen panels, on the other hand, are not affected by lighting and will always be bright green (or other colors, depending on the skin) no matter what. Combined with the complete darkness of hugevoid map, this can be used in a number of very useful ways, which you'll soon be able to see.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=186065555

2. Pose your characters and all that other stuff as usual and render the scene once it's ready. It doesn't necessarily have to be at the hugevoid map at this point, but you might as well do it there.



3. Now we have to move to hugevoid if you haven't already. Place a panel from the second mod behind the characters and set its skin from 0 to 3 to make it turn from green to white. Enable the lighting if it was disabled and hide all sources of light if you had any previously.



4. Choose a place for the main source of the light on your scene and create one there. We want this light to be as bright as possible, so move the "constantAttenuation" slider all the way to the right. Also, to make the shadows coming from this light a lot sharper, move the "shadowFilterSize" slider 90-95% to the left. Finally, I don't recommend increasing horizontal and vertical FOVs of the light by much, as it messes up the shadows.



5. Now all you have left to do is to type "mat_fullbright 2" in the console to turn everything black and white. Don't worry if it doesn't look perfect, as it should be easy to adjust our shadow manually soon enough. If everything is mostly to your liking, you're ready to render!



6. Open Photoshop (or GIMP) and put your cel shading render as a layer over the main one, while setting its blending mode to "Multiply" and reducing its opacity (usually around 30% works just fine, but sometimes it can be more or less depending on what you're going for). You can also use a brush or an eraser to edit the shadow layer if there are any rough spots you don't like.



7. Additionally, you may want to add a color tint to your shadow. To do this, create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (don't forget to right click on it and press on "create clipping mask" to make sure it only affects one layer below specifically). Next, go to its properties, enable "Colorize" option, set saturation to +100 and lightness to about +10 (or more if you want) and a tint of your choice.



Congratulations, your cel shading is done! Once again, I encourage you to check the guides listed above, as they list some other details I skipped over and overall cover the subject more thoroughly. However, I hope this section can serve as a more compact reminder of the general steps of the process.

Step 3: Extra! Extra! (aka additional techniques)

There are a few more things you can do to improve anime or cartoony renders. These techniques won't take as much time or space to explain, as they're fairly easy to grasp, especially after covering previous two.

1. "Rimlight" layers.

I wasn't really sure how to call it, but I was suggested this name by a friend and I think it's quite fitting. Basically, you can view it as the same thing as cel shading, but for the light instead of shadow. It's done about the same way as cel shading too, the main difference being you need make your greenscreen panel black (skin 5) and reposition the light so it covers your character(s) less.



You know the drill by now. Render the image and put as a layer on top. The blending mode you want this time is "Screen" and don't forget to reduce the opacity to whichever level looks good for you too.



Combined with some other effects, here's an approximate result of what you can get with it. I don't think it's as crucial for these types of renders as cel shading, but it's definitely worth considering.

2. Outlines.

Some models have in-built outlines which further help to achieve that stylized look for your render, but not all of them. Thankfully, SFM has a function that can get you a decent looking outline effect without having to draw it all by yourself.


1) Right click on the camera view and proceed to the "Render settings". There you need to place a mark next to "Ambient Occlusion" option and set its mode to "Outline Only". Also, you might want to place a greenscreen panel behind your characters if you don't want any objects in your render to have outlines as well.





2) As you might've already guessed, now you need to render the resulting image and put it on top of your other layers. If you want traditional-looking black outline, set its blending mode to "Multiply". Alternatively, I myself often make use of white outlines, which serve both as a rimlight of sorts and something that makes the characters or objects stand out more. If you want to try that, set the blending mode to "Divide" instead.







3) Let's go with the "Divide" option, which should get you something like this. Now all left to do is to adjust opacity to whatever level you're comfortable with and use the eraser tool to remove it from places you don't want to see it (usually, it's the "inner" parts of your models).






I think posting the same image twice would be kinda excessive, so If you want to see an example of how the end result is supposed to look like I suggest scrolling up where I already used this render as a part of the demonstration.

To be fair, this method of creating an outline isn't exactly flawless, which is why it's often a good idea to spend some time and adjust it manually. Alternatively, you can spend even more time and use SFM's outline as a base to draw one yourself, but it's definitely an option not for everyone.

3. Median/Oil Paint Filter.

This might sound pretty simplistic, but using these filters for your background, as well as some other parts of the image, like certain effects or objects, can be beneficial for achieving a toon look. Besides, it might help you to offset the stylistic inconsistency if you're using more realistic looking props.

Example of a background with applied median filter:

Bonus examples (with non-Persona renders)

To furthermore prove that the techniques I covered in this guide work with all kinds of models and not just Persona ones, good friends of mine, MajinBro and kvaran.kupus, gave me permission to use some of their artworks as additional examples:




As you can see, cel shading can be applied even with more realistic looking characters, creating interesting imagery you wouldn't normally be able to achieve within the constraints of standard Source lighting. Same applies to other techniques as well.

Closing thoughts & Credits

The informational part of the guide is over, so you might as well skip the rest if you don't feel like reading anymore. Still, ending it without any kind of conclusion would feel a bit anti-climactic, so I might as well say a few more words.

This was my first ever attempt at writing a guide to anything, and as it's a topic that I feel quite passionate about and other people show interest in from time to time too, I really hope it's been cohesive enough and helpful in general to whoever is reading it. I believe I touched upon everything I planned to and tried to be as thorough as reasonably possible with it, however, if something is still unclear to you, let me know and I'll try to help.

All in all, I encourage you not to stick to guides like this one word for word and instead use the information they provide to experiment on your own. After all, there isn't just one single way of doing things, especially when it comes to art.

Credits:

Kooshλ Kλrimi and SK_Form for their guides on cel shading.
MajinBro and kvaran.kupus for creation of this method of cel shading to begin with, teaching me a bunch of stuff and sharing their art for the guide.
d01nut for reading through this mess.

[The Narwhal]

I just want to apologize for doubting that this guide would work, I thought; "there's no way you can make anime-based SFM art look anime. I haven't tried it yet, but looking at it, this will work, I can tell. It's clever, a very helpful and useful guide. (I know that's a facepalm emoticon, but i'm using it like a salute, it kinda looks like a salute me.)

[Uriziel]

Thank you.

[SonofSparda]

Woot!!! Nice guide!

[SPARTAN 223]

Awesome thanks!

[Uriziel]

There's a velvet room attendant pack for GMod, I ported her from there along with everyone else.

[SPARTAN 223]

Thanks for the guide, I cant wait to start some of my projects now! small question, where did you find the Elizabeth model from? Been trying to find it but no luck ;-;

[Uriziel]

You're welcome!

[𝐒 𝐖 𝐲 𝐊]

this helped a lot thanks uriziel!

[Uriziel]

Glad to hear that it helped! And yeah, I think I'm still me.

[ThomasThePerson]

Holy woah it's you! This is extremely useful, I thank :)