what's going on, everyone? This is my preferred method of creating clean shadows on Anime-styled faces because, of course, we don't want something that looks like this. So, I learned this method from following these two tutorials, but these are not in English. So, that's why I'm making this video. Also, note that there's a tool we have to download to speed this process up. It's actually optional. If you don't want to use it, then this second tutorial shows you how to do it. Also, put a link to download the tool. And if you don't want to use my link, you could use this guy's link. So, the pros of this method are you can control exactly what you want the shadow to look like. So, you can even recreate the Guilty Gear, like how they have a triangle on the cheek. Also, it works even if your topology isn't the optimal topology. And best of all, you don't have to edit normals. The disadvantage is it's not true lighting. So, I'm only taking from the Z rotation here. And disclaimer, it is moderately

difficult to set up so you do have to know the basics of Blender to follow this tutorial, but rest assured, it's still easier than editing normals, and I will walk you through it starting now. Okay, so assuming that you already have your head made, we're just gonna make sure we have a sun object in the scene, and we don't really have to touch it for now. Let's create a material for our head, and this is a black material. You literally just go in shading and delete all the nodes except for material output. And if you're working with the full head like me, let's tab over into edit mode, and I will alt-click the loop that separates the face from the rest of the head. Then I head over to the edge menu and do Mark seam, and this is so it unwraps nicely when we go to UV editing. So let's go to UV editing now, and let's actually create a new image first. We'll name it outline, and if you want, you can multiply the resolution.

by two or whatever resolution you want. Now let's click on the edit mode side and press a to select all. Then right click on the UV editing side and click on wrap. Now I press Ctrl L and move these uh faces that are not a part of the face just off to the side. And then at Ctrl L the face faces rotated by 90 and scale it up so it fits the whole uh image. Let's try to get it as centered as we can. Then we go to the UV menu and do export UV layout. Go ahead and save it somewhere. Now we go to the shading tab shift a add an image texture. Select the image we just made outline. And then connect it to the surface because now we are going to draw our guidelines for our shadows. And this is a part where you can draw whatever you want the shadow to look like. So I am in the texture paint tab now. And I will change my brush color to literally anything except black. And the first thing I want to draw is the nose shadow. So I'll turn off my mirror.

ring, and I'm just going to draw the nose Shadow on one side of the face only, and I don't want it to be too big. It'll just be in this area, and from the front, it'll look like that. So that's kind of what I want the nose Shadow to look like. The next detail after this will be the shadow under the eyelid, and this one will be on both sides. So I'll turn my mirroring back on, and I'm just going to put it in that little crease there. The next detail will be the cheek Shadow, which is only on one side. So mirroring off, and I put it on the same side I put the nose Shadow. And of course, you can choose to include or not include any of these shadow details. It's fully up to you because, again, this is a fully customizable face Shadow. And right now, we are just drawing the guidelines for it. Now, mirroring is back on, and I will draw a total of three lines on the face. The first one will be around here where

the eye starts, and I'm just going to do from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head. Second line will meet at where that bottom corner of the triangle is, and again the middle of the chin to the top of the head, and the third line will be after where the eye ends. These are going to be our guidelines for when we create our shadow map for our face. Let me just complete this line on the other side, and that's all you need to do. Now we can go to Image and Save As, and just save it maybe at the same place that you put your UV layout. Now hopefully you have the tool from the description downloaded, and the example folder you'll see a images. Actually, we only need seven, and they'll look kind of like this. I'll explain how we're gonna make these seven images using the guidelines we just made in Blender. Now open up your image editing program and put both of the images that we have made. I'm using Photoshop. Of course, this is a UV layout which I'm going to fill around with.

black. I'll make the outline and outline layout transparent so I can use my select tool and trace around where the guidelines were, and I'll make them a little straighter if I need to. And then I fill that area with black. We're going to do this seven times: three lines on the left side, three on the right, and then one down the middle. But I'll show you each one. I'll also now show you what to do with those extra shapes that we've drawn in the guidelines. We're going to have to create a new layer for them, and I'm going to trace out the nodes here. And the eyelid shadow can also be in that same layer, so we'll just trace those out and fill them with black. I'm just going to copy it over to the other side. Make sure to join those layers back. Now for the cheek shadow, it's not going to be in black. It's going to be filled with white. And hopefully you can see what we're trying to do here. It's going to kind of look

like this because at the end of course, we're going to make everything black and white, and we're going to delete our guidelines. Now let's make another new layer for this second long cheek guideline that we have, and this layer will, of course, be under the white cheek shape. So once you fill it in, it's going to be under it, and it's going to look something like this once everything is finished. So new layer, do the third line, and it's going to be under as well. Now the fourth section we will make will go straight down the middle. We didn't draw a line on this in Blender, but that's okay because it's easy. We just go straight down the middle, and there's a line there already in your UV layout. So that's the fourth one. Let's make another new one, and we'll do three more actually for those three lines that are left, and you will have seven layers like this in total, and we will make seven images in total. Now this white cheek shadow will actually shrink in the sixth image.

disappear in the seventh image. So let's make a copy of it and make it about that much smaller. Now we hide the guidelines and turn on that black and white layer that we have. And we're going to save these seven images one by one, starting with this one. So this is where the first line was in your guidelines. Go to the SDF tool folder, the tool you just downloaded, and save this under images. Save this as G, toggle on the next layer, save this as F, next save it as E, and so on and so forth. And that's pretty straightforward up until B and A. So I'll show you what to do on B and A. This is C, and on B we will make that white cheek Shadow smaller. We use a smaller one for that, and on the last one we completely remove it so it's just black. Now I will explain this step. I am saving it as monochrome bitmap, then saving it back as PNG, and this makes it so that the bit depth is one. Unfortunately, we have to do this for

every image because the program only supports 8-bit or lower images. Once you do that, you can click run.bat, and it will generate an sdf.png. All right, you can head back over to Blender in your Shading Tab and that Image Texture node where you drew your guidelines. We can change that and instead open the image that we just generated using the tool. Looks about right. That's where we want the shadows and lights to be, but let's disconnect this for now. We're gonna set up our nodes. Now you can pause now and follow this cheat sheet that I made, but I'm also going to show you how to set this up manually. Shift A, go over here to Search and search for Texture Coordinate, Shift A again Mapping, again Color Ramp, and again Math. Again Mix RGB. All right, this ad, which was the Math node, let's actually change it to greater than, and let's go UV to Vector, Vector to Vector, Color to Factor, Color to Value, Foreign, and Color to Surface. And let's pick our colors. Well, we'll fix

this more later, but the top one will be the shadow color, and the bottom one will be the skin color. I'll just get the approximate ones, but I'll fix it later. That's not approximate at all, but whatever. All right, now let's duplicate this math node, bring it down here, and we're gonna make nine of these. Lay them out like this, and it will be easier later. So that's six, three more. One, two, three down here. Then I'm gonna add two more things: combine x, y, z, and a value. And I'm not going to explain what any of this does. I'm just going to try to do it quickly for those that don't care. But if you want to know what is the logic behind these nodes, then you can watch Ninja's video, which I'll link down below. But I'm just going to go ahead and tell you what to put for all these math notes. So first one is divide, and let's connect the value in it for now. So connect it to the top one and change this to two.

change this into fraction plug that in. This one is less than, not logarithm less than. This one is greater than, it's already greater than. Let's plug in this value to both of these. Let's leave the Threshold at 0.5 for both. This one's going to be add, this one's going to be subtract. But the value from less than to this one, and let's put the value from greater than to the bottom one of subtract. The bottom value of subtract to change subtracts value to zero and take the value output of subtract and put it on the second input of ADD. Now let's take the value from add and put it into X. Change these to one and let's take the vector from Combine XYZ and put into scale. Okay, so now let's deal with these three at the bottom. This one is fraction, subtract, and absolute. Let's plug this in like so. So the value, let's take it from all the way up there and put into fraction. Let's take this greater than and put it up here.

and let's plug in value from fraction into the value of subtract this one. There's only one more connection there. Take all this and bring it up to our greater than threshold up here. Okay, now we have to put a driver into value so you can go into layout. Click on your Sun that sun object we made earlier here. You go to item, bring this up and then right click on the rotation Z. Copy as new driver. Go back to your shading tab. Right click the value field and paste driver. Now let's edit this. It's going to be average value but we have to change it to scripted expression. And just follow along here. Minus VAR, put that in brackets and divide it by pi. Add input variable and then here let's select our head or face object. Might just head. Let's do rotation underscore underscore Euler dot Z. All right, update dependencies and we should be good to go. Now if you play around with your son Z rotation, see that's working fine and dandy. One more thing I'm gonna show you because I usually always do this too.

if you want more drawn details of the face, I have a new image texture. And basically make a new one color set the alpha to zero and face details. Then we're gonna shift a at a mix RGB put uh Alpha into Factor color into color two and your mix color into color one put it onto the surface. And this basically creates an image texture layer on top of everything that you have here. And it's completely transparent until you draw details on it. So if you go over to texture paint and let's see it's already here it's face details. But you know you can just find it if it's not there yet. And like you can draw details including uh the line of the mouth. So let's just do that real quick. Oops let's not do two lines let's just do one. So yeah if you have any questions comment them down below. If it helps consider liking and subbing. And again this method is great if you want the usual anime face shadows. And if you don't need to change the lighting like from top to bottom because we don't have

a control for that. Again, this is pseudo lighting, and it's limited to only the Z rotation. We can't make it come from below. Now, there's a way to achieve this exact look with true lighting, and of course, that involves editing normals, which is a more difficult and time-consuming method, which is why this method for me is the best of both worlds because you can make it look how you want, and it doesn't take as long as editing normals. And earlier, we already tweaked the drivers so that when you do rotate it, the proper shadow will be there. Okay, see you in the next one. Peace.

Get PERFECT Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender

Get PERFECT Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender

Scripts

Get *PERFECT* Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender

Get *PERFECT* Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender

Scripts

Get PERFECT Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender

Get PERFECT Anime Face Shadows (Easier Way) in Blender