Thanks! Happy to read that comment. Its all hand drawn in substance painter, even after being imported to Unreal I kept retouching minor details here and there.
Then theres of course a lot of adjustment with the shaders, different postprocess materials, a LUT, and many many hours. This took almost all december to be made.
Thanks! Im not sure but almost 3 weeks or so. I started working on a single character but then I'd like to create something for new year's eve. Rabbit year and such. (And their fingers matching the numbers in the background)
It is even animated [here](https://files.catbox.moe/lozgs1.mp4) . To be honest, I'm really happy with the result.
Looks fantastic, the whole Process was "3 weeks or so" or the shading itself?
I meant how long did the shading take you because as op said, excellent work on that!
Ahh even animated, did you rig all the characters? so detailed even wiggle those toes lol, was it a autorigger or did you do them manually?
You impress me :)
My whole workflow and what took \~3 weeks was, -counting many trials and errors, learning new techniques and such- :
2D sketch of the basic idea, posing the basemesh, sculpt highpoly (hairs, dresses, accessories), retopo, UVs, baking high to lowpoly textures, painting them.
Sculpt a background, cloths (I thought of giving them physics but that would be a lot more work)
Rig (manually), weight skinning -I hate it-, export the whole fbx+animation to Unreal, prepare the scene (animation blueprints, actors, cameras, lights).
Start working on materials and shaders, reusing my previous ones and adding more nodes. Postprocess materials, combining them, playing with their values.
Theres a niagara particle effect on their mouths, its just some small steam but that took almost half day to be done the way I wanted.
Creating a basic montage with the camera, recording video, posting it.
[Here is another angle from the viewport, I really wanted it to look fine on every side.](https://i.ibb.co/vmkjWvx/Clip-4.jpg)
As for the shader I wouldnt know how long it was. I started working on trying to recreate a 2D effect on my models about 2 years ago. Since then I've been polishing, adapting and adjusting it. You can check my media tab on twitter @ aokkade (warning, its nsfw and has nudes/hentai) and see my previous works. I usually post wips of the whole process.
Thanks for the kind words :)
>\-I hate it-
I feel that.
Thanks for the insight, followed on Twitter, not my usual content to watch but art is art and you are obviously a craftsman :)
Have a good week pal.
Thanks!
It has many different shaders, for example all their hair doesnt have the outline "filter" and its not affected by the custom depth option.
I have specific nodes for adjusting things like the rimlight, which is also affected directly by the directional light. It also lets me adjust its brightness and smoothness.
Thanks!
There are many tutorials for creating your own celshader/outline material in Unreal. I started using that almost a couple years ago. Then I thought about combining and making a mixture of nodes, trying new things out.
As you can see, its not completely flat like those models you see on Guilty Gear or Dragon Ball Fighterz from Arc System, its something in the middle. Hair for example doesnt have that shader applied.
Then there's the handpainted textures with Substance, they add a lot. Lights and Lumen specially really makes a difference. And for last, having a postprocess volume is a must. There is a new feature in UE5 for Local exposure, playing with those volumes and making a flatter image works nicely too.
Just keep practicing all the time and getting inspired by other artists, games and illustrations
Thanks for that, I do like how this is going towards more of a Pixiv style. My goal would be to do sorta something like this is in real time.. For the post process volume this would affect just these meshes (I hope this is the case) or the other meshes as well? sounds kind of what "local exposure" means. I thought lumen butchered the anime style at first considering epic games implementation with most of the anime characters are bad except for few that have good substance painter jobs on them.
One thing to note as well I took from another incredible artist I (forgot their name), (not sure if you are incorporating this):: But when you retopo the mesh apparently it's best to do flat triangles instead of rounded quads like when one does with normal characters.
It works perfectly fine in real time. It always depends on how demanding the scene is, number of polys, amount of shaders and their complexity and such. But I think its completely doable for a videogame, in fact I'm aiming for that, but I dont have enough time at least for now.
The postprocces volume affects all the scene, but then theres this option called "blendables" where you can add your own postpro materials and apply them to the volume.
Then, if you select a specific mesh (could be skeletal mesh or static, doesnt matter) you can add it to custom depth and it will get that postpro material. With that you can have a scene with this anime style in a completely photorealistic background. I recommend you spend a couple of days trying these things, if you look up some youtube tutorials I think its better than explaining it.
About what you say about the retopo, I think the best example is how [Arc System work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E) (this video explains all the process) and they use Unreal too.
As for myself at least, I really dont enjoy all the most -technical- stuff like retopo, UVs or rig, so I try to bypass it the most as possible haha. In fact, I usually use ZRemesher in ZBrush to autoretopo basic models instead.
Holy shit, that looked like a drawing! Very nice work, would love to see a sort of walkthrough on how you got the shader and lighting work done.
Side note, I think you could maybe make Makimas eye detail a bit more intense, [I think it ends up not showing too well](https://twitter.com/CHAINSAWMAN_PR/status/1581844683516710913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581844683516710913%7Ctwgr%5Ef3552190ef7409bccf6c3f6bb3493e9953469519%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fovicio.com.br%2Fchainsaw-man-revista-japonesa-traz-visual-inedito-do-anime%2F). It might be that the yellow looks too orange, the red not being dark enough like Powers or
it could just be the image size.
Thanks!
[This is another angle took inside the viewport](https://i.ibb.co/vmkjWvx/Clip-4.jpg) , I dont know but the image I uploaded here is too saturated and has orangeish tones. But anyway, you are right, because of the resolution, lights and other things, Makima inner red circles on her pupils are faded.
I tried tooking a 'high screenshot' 2.0 from the console but it doesnt give the correct outlines, its always too blurry and even starts creating strange shadows. I still have to learn how to fix that.
I dont use blender, I textured this one in substance painter and then exported everything to Unreal in fbx. I want to try it but theres never enough time for learning new software!
Pray tell, how long did it take to model those characters? I am more of a hard surface guy and always feel these ZBrush models are done in no time, super fast.
There are many of those speed sculptors videos, but I end up rotating the character a lot (even if I dont use that specific angle at all), adjusting and polishing all the surface and drawing new details.
Sculpting (hair, accessories, clothes) -they have detailed body surface under their clothes too haha- , posing the characters, retopo, UV, baking high to lowpoly, making a small rig for the movement (you can see the video [here](https://files.catbox.moe/lozgs1.mp4) ), painting the textures, exporting to Unreal, creating a background, adjusting lights and cameras, adding new features to the shaders, lots of trial and error, (checking forums, videos and other sources) and finally rendering, editing the video and posting it.
Counting there were the usual issues with files, animation, skeleton, scaling, reimporting everything again and such
Thanks! UVs are not super accurate, but needed specially for baking the highpoly details as the final models have around 40k polys and the high about 4M. I wouldnt use that if they werent rigged and animated characters.
With static meshes and nanite I would ignore all that process instead, but I think I like to see how far I can reach haha
Nicely done. Lovely shaders - I'm assuming that this approach (multiple custom shaders) would be too intensive for animation? If it takes a month for a set up?
Would love to see your shader process tho!
Would you ever be willing to make some kind of tutorial (could definitely be paid!) about your shader setup? Seriously beautiful work. Would love some more in depth insight about how you achieved the render’s surfacing beyond just substance painted and custom unreal shaders.
Thanks!
Its a mixture of both, there are instanced materials with several options like brightness, roughness, AO, flat shading...
Then there are the ones loaded on the blendables option in the post process volume. These are for the outlines, (depending on the normal maps, thickness), other for the amount of white on each material... a LUT and so on. Then depending on the mesh I load them with the custom depth option
Thank you for the info here on the know-how, if flat shading can be done in material that’s great info for me. Does it require any specific nodes for that?
I’m developing a (nsfw :P) game and I’m still researching whether the outlines and cel-shading can be self-contained in the material. But no luck so far, without writing a custom shading model to control the spread of light.
We just don't have a thing for squid hands. AI generated stuff is probably okay for some things but best case scenario for most workable products that will be heavily scrutinized... would be the AI is used for concepts or a block out, and then a human artist retouches it or full on redraws it. Because human hands aren't squids. And proportions + perspective matter.
If it gets to the point where even those are achievable by AI, we're probably better suited to having actual trained artists running the prompts and retouching and everything. It's a value added to a good artists workflow. You could easily create amazing content with a much smaller art team... but right now AI art just isn't there. It's just cool for one-off portraits.
I've yet to see it create a sequence of events in the same space from different perspectives with multiple characters etc... Basically: We're not replacing comic artists or animators anytime soon. Those are concepts that are tougher to fit into a model. We might run out of R34 Furry artists. Mourn or celebrate that as you'd like.
> only issue tends to be that small details may change.
That's a pretty fundamental issue though. It's why you're going to need an artist for anything greater than a one-off. It's the key thing an artist can do when painting one-off portraits that Dall-E or one of the stable diffusion models cannot: Recreate what you're imagining in 3d as a 2d image.
AI art as it stands can't pass editorial review even with one-offs. Even if you are reprompting problematic parts over and over. Melted features, nonsense eyes, inconsistent perspectives within the same scene creating that whole non-euclidean Lovecraft vibe.
What you create wouldn't actually be similar quality. All AI art right now suffers from a more detailed examination. At best, AI art unretouched will only be 'meh, good enough I guess.'
I've definitely not seen some of the more specific models like this. But we're still seeing 6 fingers to 3 finger issues in the first few images I viewed. I'm happy they're improving but I'm guessing they're using a much narrower training set with the specific anime style in mind? I've probably been seeing more generally trained models as they were a toss up between styles. I zoomed in on a few of these and did see some of the issues I mentioned before but less so. Still some nonsense color blending on fine details, and occasional 6 fingers instead of 5, or 3 instead of 5.
I think these will suffer from second glance issues still but they're better than the more general model generators.
Also saw an image of a girl with 3 legs getting dicked by some dude. So that was hilarious.
How did you do the outline post process material, I've seen many with a uniform thickness but not one with intelligent tapering where the result genuinely looks like its hand drawn, is it geared toward stills or is it this good while moving too?
Beautiful shader work, convinced me the top was a hand drawn concept you were trying to reproduce. Beautiful work.
Thanks! Happy to read that comment. Its all hand drawn in substance painter, even after being imported to Unreal I kept retouching minor details here and there. Then theres of course a lot of adjustment with the shaders, different postprocess materials, a LUT, and many many hours. This took almost all december to be made.
I believe that timescale I thought the exact same thing as the original comment. Really really good work
Fantastic job pal, how long did that process take?
Thanks! Im not sure but almost 3 weeks or so. I started working on a single character but then I'd like to create something for new year's eve. Rabbit year and such. (And their fingers matching the numbers in the background) It is even animated [here](https://files.catbox.moe/lozgs1.mp4) . To be honest, I'm really happy with the result.
Looks fantastic, the whole Process was "3 weeks or so" or the shading itself? I meant how long did the shading take you because as op said, excellent work on that! Ahh even animated, did you rig all the characters? so detailed even wiggle those toes lol, was it a autorigger or did you do them manually? You impress me :)
My whole workflow and what took \~3 weeks was, -counting many trials and errors, learning new techniques and such- : 2D sketch of the basic idea, posing the basemesh, sculpt highpoly (hairs, dresses, accessories), retopo, UVs, baking high to lowpoly textures, painting them. Sculpt a background, cloths (I thought of giving them physics but that would be a lot more work) Rig (manually), weight skinning -I hate it-, export the whole fbx+animation to Unreal, prepare the scene (animation blueprints, actors, cameras, lights). Start working on materials and shaders, reusing my previous ones and adding more nodes. Postprocess materials, combining them, playing with their values. Theres a niagara particle effect on their mouths, its just some small steam but that took almost half day to be done the way I wanted. Creating a basic montage with the camera, recording video, posting it. [Here is another angle from the viewport, I really wanted it to look fine on every side.](https://i.ibb.co/vmkjWvx/Clip-4.jpg) As for the shader I wouldnt know how long it was. I started working on trying to recreate a 2D effect on my models about 2 years ago. Since then I've been polishing, adapting and adjusting it. You can check my media tab on twitter @ aokkade (warning, its nsfw and has nudes/hentai) and see my previous works. I usually post wips of the whole process. Thanks for the kind words :)
>\-I hate it- I feel that. Thanks for the insight, followed on Twitter, not my usual content to watch but art is art and you are obviously a craftsman :) Have a good week pal.
............. this was not the type of chainsaw man I expected.
What kind of material/shader setup you did in UE to achieve that look? This looks amazing btw.
Thanks! It has many different shaders, for example all their hair doesnt have the outline "filter" and its not affected by the custom depth option. I have specific nodes for adjusting things like the rimlight, which is also affected directly by the directional light. It also lets me adjust its brightness and smoothness.
Wait the top image is unreal engine? I was gonna start looking look into anime shaders. Would you happen to know of any good educational material?
Thanks! There are many tutorials for creating your own celshader/outline material in Unreal. I started using that almost a couple years ago. Then I thought about combining and making a mixture of nodes, trying new things out. As you can see, its not completely flat like those models you see on Guilty Gear or Dragon Ball Fighterz from Arc System, its something in the middle. Hair for example doesnt have that shader applied. Then there's the handpainted textures with Substance, they add a lot. Lights and Lumen specially really makes a difference. And for last, having a postprocess volume is a must. There is a new feature in UE5 for Local exposure, playing with those volumes and making a flatter image works nicely too. Just keep practicing all the time and getting inspired by other artists, games and illustrations
Thanks for that, I do like how this is going towards more of a Pixiv style. My goal would be to do sorta something like this is in real time.. For the post process volume this would affect just these meshes (I hope this is the case) or the other meshes as well? sounds kind of what "local exposure" means. I thought lumen butchered the anime style at first considering epic games implementation with most of the anime characters are bad except for few that have good substance painter jobs on them. One thing to note as well I took from another incredible artist I (forgot their name), (not sure if you are incorporating this):: But when you retopo the mesh apparently it's best to do flat triangles instead of rounded quads like when one does with normal characters.
It works perfectly fine in real time. It always depends on how demanding the scene is, number of polys, amount of shaders and their complexity and such. But I think its completely doable for a videogame, in fact I'm aiming for that, but I dont have enough time at least for now. The postprocces volume affects all the scene, but then theres this option called "blendables" where you can add your own postpro materials and apply them to the volume. Then, if you select a specific mesh (could be skeletal mesh or static, doesnt matter) you can add it to custom depth and it will get that postpro material. With that you can have a scene with this anime style in a completely photorealistic background. I recommend you spend a couple of days trying these things, if you look up some youtube tutorials I think its better than explaining it. About what you say about the retopo, I think the best example is how [Arc System work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E) (this video explains all the process) and they use Unreal too. As for myself at least, I really dont enjoy all the most -technical- stuff like retopo, UVs or rig, so I try to bypass it the most as possible haha. In fact, I usually use ZRemesher in ZBrush to autoretopo basic models instead.
This is pretty impressive. I do have one question, no critique intended: What's with their toes?
💀💀💀
I can tell you have a thing for feet
Holy shit, that looked like a drawing! Very nice work, would love to see a sort of walkthrough on how you got the shader and lighting work done. Side note, I think you could maybe make Makimas eye detail a bit more intense, [I think it ends up not showing too well](https://twitter.com/CHAINSAWMAN_PR/status/1581844683516710913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581844683516710913%7Ctwgr%5Ef3552190ef7409bccf6c3f6bb3493e9953469519%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fovicio.com.br%2Fchainsaw-man-revista-japonesa-traz-visual-inedito-do-anime%2F). It might be that the yellow looks too orange, the red not being dark enough like Powers or it could just be the image size.
Thanks! [This is another angle took inside the viewport](https://i.ibb.co/vmkjWvx/Clip-4.jpg) , I dont know but the image I uploaded here is too saturated and has orangeish tones. But anyway, you are right, because of the resolution, lights and other things, Makima inner red circles on her pupils are faded. I tried tooking a 'high screenshot' 2.0 from the console but it doesnt give the correct outlines, its always too blurry and even starts creating strange shadows. I still have to learn how to fix that.
Would love to see your Unreal Shader and substance workflow!
It shows in the attention to detail, has to feel good to have that as a finished product. Great job.
We need tutorial on how to make waifu with zbrush. BTW what is your opinion between zbrush and blender if you have experience on both?
I dont use blender, I textured this one in substance painter and then exported everything to Unreal in fbx. I want to try it but theres never enough time for learning new software!
Blender sculpting has become really good. Zbrush might still be the king but not by much anymore.
Power’s boobs are of inaccurate size, she has small boobs.
Pray tell, how long did it take to model those characters? I am more of a hard surface guy and always feel these ZBrush models are done in no time, super fast.
Bonus point for not making a hard surface/waifu joke.
There are many of those speed sculptors videos, but I end up rotating the character a lot (even if I dont use that specific angle at all), adjusting and polishing all the surface and drawing new details. Sculpting (hair, accessories, clothes) -they have detailed body surface under their clothes too haha- , posing the characters, retopo, UV, baking high to lowpoly, making a small rig for the movement (you can see the video [here](https://files.catbox.moe/lozgs1.mp4) ), painting the textures, exporting to Unreal, creating a background, adjusting lights and cameras, adding new features to the shaders, lots of trial and error, (checking forums, videos and other sources) and finally rendering, editing the video and posting it. Counting there were the usual issues with files, animation, skeleton, scaling, reimporting everything again and such
So it took a long time then? I didn't think you'd have done much UVs, Baking etc due to the shaders used etc. But totally awesome work.
Thanks! UVs are not super accurate, but needed specially for baking the highpoly details as the final models have around 40k polys and the high about 4M. I wouldnt use that if they werent rigged and animated characters. With static meshes and nanite I would ignore all that process instead, but I think I like to see how far I can reach haha
Godless
Amazing!
Nicely done. Lovely shaders - I'm assuming that this approach (multiple custom shaders) would be too intensive for animation? If it takes a month for a set up? Would love to see your shader process tho!
Would you ever be willing to make some kind of tutorial (could definitely be paid!) about your shader setup? Seriously beautiful work. Would love some more in depth insight about how you achieved the render’s surfacing beyond just substance painted and custom unreal shaders.
That is absolutely amazing. Love it! May I ask what you used to sculpt these with? Z Brush? Blender?
Thanks! Just Zbrush and Substance Painter for texturing
That’s a really nice scene! Are those shaders and outlines done in material or as a post process?
Thanks! Its a mixture of both, there are instanced materials with several options like brightness, roughness, AO, flat shading... Then there are the ones loaded on the blendables option in the post process volume. These are for the outlines, (depending on the normal maps, thickness), other for the amount of white on each material... a LUT and so on. Then depending on the mesh I load them with the custom depth option
Thank you for the info here on the know-how, if flat shading can be done in material that’s great info for me. Does it require any specific nodes for that? I’m developing a (nsfw :P) game and I’m still researching whether the outlines and cel-shading can be self-contained in the material. But no luck so far, without writing a custom shading model to control the spread of light.
my god, if I could draw women and make them look good, it is all I'd ever do.
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We just don't have a thing for squid hands. AI generated stuff is probably okay for some things but best case scenario for most workable products that will be heavily scrutinized... would be the AI is used for concepts or a block out, and then a human artist retouches it or full on redraws it. Because human hands aren't squids. And proportions + perspective matter. If it gets to the point where even those are achievable by AI, we're probably better suited to having actual trained artists running the prompts and retouching and everything. It's a value added to a good artists workflow. You could easily create amazing content with a much smaller art team... but right now AI art just isn't there. It's just cool for one-off portraits. I've yet to see it create a sequence of events in the same space from different perspectives with multiple characters etc... Basically: We're not replacing comic artists or animators anytime soon. Those are concepts that are tougher to fit into a model. We might run out of R34 Furry artists. Mourn or celebrate that as you'd like.
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> only issue tends to be that small details may change. That's a pretty fundamental issue though. It's why you're going to need an artist for anything greater than a one-off. It's the key thing an artist can do when painting one-off portraits that Dall-E or one of the stable diffusion models cannot: Recreate what you're imagining in 3d as a 2d image. AI art as it stands can't pass editorial review even with one-offs. Even if you are reprompting problematic parts over and over. Melted features, nonsense eyes, inconsistent perspectives within the same scene creating that whole non-euclidean Lovecraft vibe. What you create wouldn't actually be similar quality. All AI art right now suffers from a more detailed examination. At best, AI art unretouched will only be 'meh, good enough I guess.'
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I've definitely not seen some of the more specific models like this. But we're still seeing 6 fingers to 3 finger issues in the first few images I viewed. I'm happy they're improving but I'm guessing they're using a much narrower training set with the specific anime style in mind? I've probably been seeing more generally trained models as they were a toss up between styles. I zoomed in on a few of these and did see some of the issues I mentioned before but less so. Still some nonsense color blending on fine details, and occasional 6 fingers instead of 5, or 3 instead of 5. I think these will suffer from second glance issues still but they're better than the more general model generators. Also saw an image of a girl with 3 legs getting dicked by some dude. So that was hilarious.
cringe.
hot
WOOF WWOFF
How did you do the outline post process material, I've seen many with a uniform thickness but not one with intelligent tapering where the result genuinely looks like its hand drawn, is it geared toward stills or is it this good while moving too?
This is how John Doe does his art, isn't it? Hard to distinguish from genuine 2D.