I tried to clean up the shade of Toon Shader. (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

Recently, I've been fascinated by 3D anime-style expressions, so I've been experimenting with Toon Shaders. When trying to achieve a Toon-like expression for anime characters in 3D, the shadows can sometimes appear rough and unrefined.

A common solution to this is to adjust the model's normals to make the shade look cleaner.

However, tweaking the model's normals can be surprisingly cumbersome. So, I thought about whether it could be simplified using Shader control and gave it a try.

And it worked!

What I did was blend the normal information from the Unity space with the model's normal information to smooth out the shade.

While adjusting the model's normals allows for more detailed expressions, I found that controlling it through the Shader is also a good, simpler alternative. Being able to change the way shade applied by adjusting the blend values is a nice touch.

On the Unity Asset Store, there are shaders with similar functions available, like RealToon and YSA Toon. RealToon supports point lights and ambient light and is compatible with Built-In, URP, HDRP, so it feels quite versatile.

However, personally, if you want to achieve a Japanese anime-style Toon expression, using shaders like lil Toon, Unity Toon, MToon might be better. A major reason is that you can set textures for the shadows. For instance, it's great that you can remove highlights from the shadow textures or change the shadow drawings. Being able to specify shadows like No. 1 and No. 2 shadows allows for creating various styles easily.

For now, I'm satisfied that I've achieved the expression I wanted to create. I plan to utilize this in future 3D anime expressions!