stylized-renderinglisted

# Stylized Rendering (NPR / cel-shaded) Build the stylized look of a character-action game in the **anime-cel lineage**. Primary references (all with public tech talks or well-documented reverse-engineering): **Guilty Gear Xrd** (Arc System Works, GDC 2015 — the canonical primary source), **Genshin Impact** / **Honkai: Star Rail** (miHoYo, GDC 2021 + community RE), **Hi-Fi Rush** (Tango, GDC 2024 — documents the SDF face method), **Zelda BotW** (Nintendo, GDC 2017 — painterly anti-cel), **Team Fortress 2** (Valve, NPAR 2007 — half-lambert, warm/cool shadows). A stylized look is **art direction expressed through shading math, then frozen into authored data**: ramps, channel-packed control maps, smoothed normals, SDF face maps, hand-edited vertex normals. The renderer is the cheap part — the look lives in the authored maps. Plan the **art pipeline**, not just the shader. Excluded (separate skills): web/React screen-space shaders (`shaders`), full- site palette extraction (`extract-theme`), in-engine VFX/particles, animation. Engine-wide practice: `unity` / `ue5-aaa-best-practices`. ## Pick your art-direction pole first Every threshold, band count, ramp, and outline width descends from one upstream choice — where you sit on the **flat-graphic ↔ lit-dimensional** dial. Decide it before writing a line of shader: | Dial | Flat-graphic (Guilty Gear Xrd) | Lit-dimensional (Genshin, HSR) | Painterly (BotW) | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Bands | 2 (near-binary) | 2–3 + outer shado