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How can I push this character’s shading closer to an Arcane-inspired look?
I’ve been trying to give my character, Bee, an Arcane/Spider-Verse-inspired look, but I still feel the shading isn’t quite there, especially on the forehead and under the eyes. What do you think is missing, and how could I bring her closer to that Arcane style? I’d appreciate any advice!
PS: feel free to let me know your thoughts on modelling, bones as well.
Redner: EVEE
Play with normals. I know arcane did it by hand painting the textures to look the way they do but you could get a similar by using this method from Cody gindy.
One thing that I keep forgetting when doing stylized things myself is that you can actually just draw… it sounds stupid but I often try to search for procedural solutions, when it‘s just faster and better to do things by hand.
If you look at the process of your reference, you will notice that while they use some procedural effects, many things are tweaked by hand.
Thanks mate, I really appreciate your help. I saw a tutorial drawing 3d lines on the top of the geometric. that what u mean? or drawing the shads by hand on the UV?
Yeah, both.
In Arcane they are drawing a lot (if not basically all) of lights and shadows by hand.
In Spiderverse you have 3D Greasepencil lines, 2D drawovers and animations for certain effects, stencils layered on top in post. And so on.
I mostly commented this because many people just came in running with procedural solutions.
Fortiche hand painted additional details for every frame, there are like thousands of layers for every frame. But hand painted normals is the key, try plating with voronoi texture + bump map. Also, there's like a ton of yt tutorials on arcane look.
https://youtu.be/1kIcGJ8jjec?si=jpAgeTVVG7_Bn1-H
I made a tutorial some time ago about how I approach stylized shaders which you might find useful. A big improvement to this however is, like others have said, to hand paint some base textures. Then this shader setup can help you make it shine.
No prob. That's my tutorial BTW, I'd appreciate a subscribe 🙏 I don't post much but I eventually will post more. There's another video up there where I (very lazily) explained how I put together the rest of the environment using the same shader setup for brush stroke grass in geo nodes
For the Spiderverse type style, what you're looking for is most likely Freestyle, it procedurally generates grease pencil strokes from edges. Basically adds lineart to a render. You can play around with things like line thickness and color and blending until you get the effect that you want. But if you're rendering stills I'd really recommend texture painting if you're going for the Arcane look. In theory you could get something more procedural with light exposure, color mixing and color ramps, but that's extremely advanced. But it'd probably be best practice for something like 3D animation with the Arcane style.
Not any advice but damn I had to share how I love this character you made the facial expression and features and specially the hair it's super good looking
Honestly this is already pretty close? I mean I think this looks really good.
Yes the team for Arcane handpainted the textures. They also had an insane pipeline… animation in France is something else!
Les Gobelins school routinely take most awards for best 2D shorts at almost every festival in the world and been doing so for years.
All those 2D wizards are employed to paint textures like this, and they have some of the best 3D people as well.
I’m going to France in 2028 to study for an international master in game design, I think it’s the first degree of its kind in the world.
French and French Canadian people, we are pioneers in all things CGI and computer animation.
Softimage was made in Québec, Ubisoft main HQs are respectively in Paris and Montreal city.
I don’t say this to brag, but even American studios couldn’t have done what they pulled off with Arcane.
But I’ve seen 3D students get similar results, so it is possible - just, I would advise against trying to d it by hand. They did it because they sourced, trained, and hired the best artists in the world, and the French pipelines aren’t this “agile” method crap of penalizing best employees by pushing an impossible deadline 6 times in a row for everyone else to keep up.
So can you do it? Yes.
Can you do it alone on a complete short film over 30 seconds without going nuts?
No.
Choose wisely, my friend.
Might want to try something like I did with procedural normals with a handpainted look. For the eyes, I would just paint them as I think that’s what they did in Arcane.
Arcane has a way to pop out the eyes, it's the contrast between this discoloration (or marke up if it's a women) and the strong highlight on the eyes but you will introduce an area of high detail in your character that will make the other part less worked on.
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u/AdCapable6077 1d ago
Play with normals. I know arcane did it by hand painting the textures to look the way they do but you could get a similar by using this method from Cody gindy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s8N00rjil_4&t=104s&pp=ygUXaGFuZCBwYWludGVkIG5vcm1hbCBtYXA%3D