Is this cel-shading? How does it work?

Graphics
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I hope this is the right forum; I couldn’t find a better place to ask a game-art question, and I am working in Unity, hopefully this isn’t too off-topic. Forgive me, I’m quite new at this, but I’ve had an art-style in mind that I wanted to practice and I hadn’t seen anything like it until I came across this. Just wondering what general techniques were likely used to achieve this result. I think it’s cel-shading, but I’m not sure, and I’m not really sure how it works.

The subject in question is early footage of the Zelda Wii U title in development, and I’ve found 2 videos that show what I’m referring to fairly well, and also a more easily studied screenshot.

Screenshot: http://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/images/d/d7/Zelda-wii-u-link-720.jpg

Video 1:

Video 2:

If you look at the character’s shirt, skin, gloves, hair, the leather straps, and the horse’s fur and mane/tail… it’s all awesome, I just don’t understand what’s going on! Are those textures essentially solid colors, and all the shading on them coming from in-game light sources? The folds in the clothing, and the shaded parts of the horse’s frame, are those shapes carved into the 3D model itself? How does that work? I’ve never seen a cel-shaded game that looked like this… it’s like, semi-realistic cel-shading. Some of the lines made by the shading in that screenshot look hand-drawn (like the jagged lines on the belt that goes across the chest), but I know it’s essentially a still frame taken out of that video, all of which was rendered in the game engine. I also can’t tell if these models are really low-poly or really high-poly and that’s boggling my mind.

I’m not trying to plagiarize their art style or anything. I just want to know how it works, so I can aspire to make something that beautiful one day. :slight_smile: Thanks for your time, sorry if this is a terrible question to ask or the wrong place to ask it.

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It’s a little of everything. Cloth simulation for hair and clothing movement. Hand painted textures with simple detail/designs. Normal/bump map for the clothing folds and ripples. Ramp shading for that sharp step shading. Rim lighting to highlight edges from light. Mostly low/mid poly but everything is modeled out.
Most of the style comes from normal map and ramp shading, play around with this to see it.

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Yeah it’s just art and ramp shaders, basically. Art takes you so damn far.

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Thanks very much for the responses! I clearly have a lot to learn about shaders. (And normal maps). Someone else told me it was likely a 5-way cel-shader (or ramp/step shader, what-have-you) with another, softer shader on top, and also secondary illumination, that was doing most of the work here. That idea is beginning to make sense to me, you start with the cel-shader but after you get the desired result, you throw some “realistic” lighting on top. A lot of that could just be the Rim-lighting too, though (and I know very little about this).

I’m still puzzled by the textures though. I don’t see any details that don’t change on the fly with the position & light. In my mind it still seems like the textures are just solid colors. Like, the character’s shirt, just paint-bucket blue (aside from the white trim). Surely it can’t be that simple?

Thanks again for the responses! :slight_smile: I have new things to study and I’m excited about that!

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I’m pretty sure knowing nintendo and the target hardware it’s simple as hell - standard ramp, but a lot of good art. Much of the effect is from art direction and a simple but good post.

All ramp is, is a way to change how the light is evaluated in the shader. Different materials can have different ramps.

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