Some super quick examples! Second pic showing the setup - probably far from the best way of doing it, but it works!

Spent an embarrassingly long time fumbling around on this today, but I got something I'm pretty pleased with:

And thats it for now. Sorry for long potentially boring thread, but I'm learning all this as I go and finding it really interesting!

-(the body won't need this vertex info because its a fully separate object). During my research into anime style cel-shading, its pretty clear that faces can look pretty bad unless handled very carefully, often with custom normals or SDF Shadowmaps. So this may form part of that :) But who knows!

And finally the most interesting to me as its the most mysterious: the blend into purple below the chin on his head. I can only guess, but I suspect this info is potentially being used to help differentiate between "special face shading" and the rest of the skin-

Green seems to be used to dictate render order. In-game, the eyebrows/eyelashes are always rendered in front of the hair, as a stylistic choice. And the purple of the hair shadow may also be related, as they too render in an unusual order (on top of the eyebrows but behind the hair!)

Side note: Its also a really efficient way to deal with AO on hair - as it means the hair strands UVs can all overlap. You can use more than one set of UVs (the second can be non-overlapping in order to bake AO), but this way means just one simple UV set is required!

Most obvious is the shade of red on the skin and hair. This is almost definitely Ambient Occlusion, which can add some nice depth. Typically this is just baked onto a texture, as shown on his trunks - though I suspect for stylised cel-shading, this is sufficient!

🧵 Here is a look into how Vertex Colours are used in Xenoblade 3!
I've put together a short thread with my best guesses
This first pic is just Noah with the vertex colours overlayed on top of his materials. However I'll remove the materials so its even clearer going forward

baha true! Gonna wait until their bodies are done, but I'm really excited and nervous to make their outfits. I hope they end up looking as good as i envisage!

First set of homemade textures to replace the XC3 ones - eyes! Quite pleased with the result. I won't be happy until I've replaced everything, but its nice to get a start

All that is to say, should they ever do Switch 2 versions, the character assets would 100% still look amazing without any work whatsoever!

The normal map for A's body is 2048px btw, and it's totally possible that Monolith would have masters in 4096px. On Switch its really hard to appreciate the details, they are almost overkill - though cutscenes definitely benefit from this.

alright this is no surprise to anyone with any 3d art experience, but its cool nonetheless imo; Normal maps do SO MUCH heavy lifting! And they stand up to close scrutiny too - they still look great on a 4k display, which is insane given the game is i think 720p max?

One thing Monolith do which I love is blending the lower eyelid using vertex alphas (as kindly demonstrated by A); so where its black will be fully transparent ingame, giving that lovely soft look. Second pic is from ingame - also note the eyelashes and eyebrowns rendering in front of the hair!

Note all the nice little details on the XC3 models - the fake shadows for hair and eyes, little highlights on the nose/lips. I'll do those too eventually

previous pics were using flat shading atm (so texture only basically), because they look awful with normal shading and no toon shader setup! Tho tbf, the XC3 models look pretty goofy too without the proper cel shading, here is a comparison:

atm I'm still borrowing some XC3 assets (face, eye and hair textures, plus Fei's hair is actually Matthews but stretched around!), though in time I'll make my own and replace them. For now I'm fully focussing on getting the face and hair forms correct

So for a while I've been wanting to learn how to make game characters, but quickly realised I have no actual creativity 😭
So i've settled on trying to remake Fei and Elly from Xenogears, in the style of Xenoblade 3. SUPER WIP atm but i'm actually kinda happy with how its going now.