Cell shading a snowy city
I'm working on a cell shading technique based on the cutscenes from the Final fantasy game; War of the lions.
I love the art style. it has this crosshatched, pencil shaded effect that lends to the idea of the game being a recounted story that may be in an old book. The art style does a good job of mirroring some of the earlier concept art that has a basic anime while creating a feeling of both story and time using crosshatching and desaturated colors.
The video below is the complete set of cutscenes from the game. I haven't played all the way through and the story makes relatively little sense to me even when i was. the dialog is confusing as hell and it seem to have some politics in there that I'm sure I should have been paying attention to. That being said I could watch it all the way through just watching the visuals.
Warning: Boring Technical stuff!
the technique I'v put together has involved a heavy amount of compositing. I have combined three different shadow passes to identify what parts of the models are in shadow. using this I have the crosshatched texture only show in the shadow areas.
I'v used a story that I wrote with a friend at uni for the basis for this little experiment. I'm about to get very busy so I'm likely to leave it for now but as for what is next I am thinking about collaborating with an illustrator friend of mine to design the more important characters.
