Cel Shading



Cel Shading is a style of computer rendering that imitates the look of hand-drawn artwork and animation. In layman's terms, it replaces the shading gradient of conventional rendering with flat colors and shadows (as seen at right). The style was pioneered with the Sega Dreamcast game Jet Set Radio, the first game to use 3D polygons to produce a cartoony look.

While the style is not exclusive to Video Games, it is often used there since this is the only way to produce a hand-drawn look via computer polygons. In other media, Cel Shading can be useful to render specific items in a hand-drawn production, if a given scene would be too difficult to animate by hand, such as a rotating object or an Epic Tracking Shot traveling down the length of a massive vehicle. There are also animated series produced exclusively via cel shading, usually for similar reasons. When mixing cel shading with traditional animation, it's important to calibrate the renderer to avoid visually clashing with the rest of the production (i.e. being too detailed or smoothly animated).

Be careful when tossing terms around; Cel Shading applies first and foremost to the way the lighting is rendered. Conventional rendering can still utilize solid colors, simplistic textures, and cartoonish caricatures (e.g. The Incredibles or the 3D Super Mario games). Likewise, Cel Shading can be as realistically-proportioned and textured as any hand-drawing. Actual hand-drawn media is never an example, for obvious reasons, nor are cels drawn on computers in a manner similar to convention animation.

The name comes from the cels hand-drawn cartoons were traditionally painted on to. Chiaroscuro is an oft-used visual effect.

Anime and Manga

 * Appleseed -- The 2004 movie and its sequel, Ex Machina.
 * From the same production team, Vexille.
 * Transformers Energon used cel shading for the CGI transformers. How well they did is a whole other matter entirely.
 * Occassionally, the CGI would be replaced with traditional animation, creating an even worse jarring effect- and worse yet- it blew the CGI out of the water.
 * Ghost in The Shell Stand Alone Complex used excellent cel shading on the CG Tachikomas. Other CG vehicles tended to be rather more conspicuous.
 * Freedom Project, which had character designs by Katsuhiro Otomo.
 * Initial D Fourth Stage uses cel shading to great effect, compared to the Conspicuous CG of earlier stages.
 * Envy's true form in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is cel shaded CGI. Also the various animated suits of armour.

Live-action television

 * In one episode of Warehouse 13 featuring a virtual reality game, the "in-game" scenes were subtly rendered with cel shading techniques to help distinguish them from the outside reality.

Video Games

 * Goosebumps: Attack of the Mutant was, apparently, one of the first games to use cel-shaded graphics.
 * The Simpsons Game
 * Red Steel 2 does this, which actually makes the game look better on the Wii than if they were to go for a realistic style.
 * The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker famously used this, causing a huge backlash from the Fandom/FanDumb before and shortly after release, when everyone realized it was in fact awesome.
 * The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword also has a cel-shading style (made to look like an impressionist painting rather than a cartoon), but set on characters with proportions more in line with Twilight Princess. It got the same initial reaction.
 * Fire Emblem: Path Of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn both used cel-shading in cutscenes that at times looks almost exactly like traditional animation.
 * Jet Set Radio, and its follow-up Jet Set Radio Future. In fact, the Dreamcast version of Jet Set Radio developed the basic technique for cel shading in videogames for the first time. It was the earliest true 3D game to deliberately incorporate manga-esque cel shading into its graphics engine.
 * Cel Damage
 * Choro Q Works
 * Musashi: Samurai Legend, loose sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi
 * Dark Cloud 2
 * Rogue Galaxy
 * Killer 7
 * Lemmingball Z
 * Future Boy Conan
 * Sly Cooper
 * Steambot Chronicles
 * Viewtiful Joe
 * Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People adopts the style of its parent web animated series Homestar Runner.
 * XIII
 * Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and both Digital Devil Saga games.
 * Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Graces. Playing one after the other shows how Namco's cel-shading abilities got better and better.
 * Dragon Quest entries VIII and IX.
 * No More Heroes and its sequel.
 * Wild Arms 3, done to hide the fact that the models are almost PS 1-quality. All subsequent Wild Arms games utilize it much better, however.
 * The 2008 Prince of Persia game, another painted-style approach.
 * Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter.
 * Ultimate Spider-Man used a version that looked a bit more like a comic-book rather than a cartoon.
 * Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner used a subtler version to give the visuals a unique style.
 * The Naruto: Ultimate Ninja series
 * The Dragonball Z Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi series, starting with the second one. (The Gamecube version of the first Budokai had something like cel-shading, though.)
 * Bomberman Jetters. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the game wasn't cel-shaded.
 * Bleach: Shattered Blade
 * Valkyria Chronicles: Looks like a chiaroscuro drawing painted with watercolors.
 * Punch Out for the Wii features this look.
 * Chrome Hounds uses cel-shading in a subtle manner, similar to Zone of the Enders 2.
 * A good deal of XenoAisam's custom Unreal Tournament 2004 skins are celshaded; this makes them stick out, as not only are they not affected by lighting, but UT2004 itself is not celshaded. There are even Unreal Tournament custom skins that go for a cel-shaded look...which looks unusually convincing given that Unreal Engine doesn't even supported programmable shaders at all, or even hardware transform & lighting. (It was originally designed with 3dfx cards in mind, after all.)
 * Under The Skin
 * Futurama
 * Robotech Battlecry
 * Digimon Savers: Another Mission, released in English as Digimon World Data Squad.
 * Mega Man X Command Mission
 * Auto Modellista is notable as the only auto racing game to use cel shading.
 * The second Fullmetal Alchemist video game uses cel shaded graphics and looks a lot better for it.
 * Atelier Rorona
 * Fairly Odd Parents: Breakin' Da' Rules used this.
 * Action Doom 2 Urban Brawl is an interesting example - cel shading in the Doom engine! It's done by having all the sprites drawn with thick black outlines, and all the level geometry surrounded with black wafer-thin rectangles visible only from the inner side, thus making the map geometry look like it's got a black outline too no matter what angle it's viewed from.
 * Naruto Clash of Ninja
 * The MMORPG Mabinogi
 * Another MMORPG, Dream of Mirror Online
 * Yet another MMORPG, Champions Online used this.
 * Asuras Wrath
 * The Darkness 2 will have a cell shaded look, apparently to remind players of it's comic book origins (but seeing as how cell shading gives a cartoony feel, and the comics were grim & gritty, YMMV on how well that works).

Western Animation

 * MTV's Spider-Man the New Animated Series, produced by Mainframe Entertainment was computer animated, but done using cel shading.
 * Re Boot had an episode in a game based on Pokémon and Dragonball Z and the entire world was cel shaded, even the main characters when they rebooted into game characters.
 * The Drinky Crow Show.
 * Skyland: A weird middle ground between cartoon style and Realism, leading down into the Uncanny Valley.
 * The CGI parts of Futurama, such as the Planet Express ship and the New New York backdrop, are cel-shaded so well that in some scenes, the animation staff (in the DVD Commentary) can't tell what's CG and what's hand-drawn.
 * Because of their bigger budgets, post-revival epsiodes of Family Guy use cel-shaded CG for things like cars and moving backgrounds.
 * Iron Man Armored Adventures
 * The Iron Giant: The Giant is CG, and fits perfect with the traditionally-animated human characters and landscapes. This is largely because the animation team added subtle imperfections to the Giant's outline and framerate to make it more closely resemble traditional animation.
 * Star Wars Clone Wars: The CGI vehicles.
 * The wildebeest stampede from The Lion King was created this way.
 * Disney's Tangled was originally supposed to look like an oil painting on canvas, but the technology was never perfected, so it ended up being done with conventional computer animation. However, the look is much softer and more fluid than any movie that's come beforehand, and the character designs are a very good translation of Disney 2D. That said, the oil painting look can be seen in some of the backgrounds. It's especially evident in some of the forest scenes.
 * Transformers Prime is animated in CG, but the overall look of the show emulates elements of both regular CG and Cel Shaded graphics. What is done is in addition to the "hard line" shadow they also added a third level, a reflective highlight to the metal forms, and so achieving a "cel shaded but not quite cel shaded" look to it. The regular humans have a bit more of a traditional CG appearance, but the hard shadow is still apparent and they have slightly exaggerated proportions to better blend with the hyper-stylized robots.
 * The 3D segments of Invader Zim use cel-shaded spaceships, planets and stuff.
 * In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sandy, SpongeBob, & The Worm", this was used in one shot when Sandy & SpongeBob were running away from the giant worm.
 * "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" segment of Fantasia 2000.
 * Tron Uprising

Other

 * A software called Dance×Mixer.
 * Character-poser software such Poser and Daz Studio, and full animation suites such as Carerra and 3DSMax, have a cel-shader packaged or available as an optional extra. 3D Custom Girl features cel-shading by default. The last one is used more for producing hentai images, but so are all the others.

Not cel-shading, but often mistaken for it

 * Borderlands used black outlines and textures with penciled-in lines to give the game a stylized Comic Book-esque look, but the lighting and shading was done realistically.
 * Similarly, Street Fighter IV has adopted a sort of inkbrush look but does not use actual cel-shading.
 * Fear Effect is an odd example: It used special textures to fake the look of cel-shading, but the characters weren't actually lit by anything. While it uses a completely different technique from cel-shading, in execution it looks identical.
 * At the time Disney made The Great Mouse Detective, a method for placing CGI directly into an animated film didn't exist. The clock innards were created as wire-frame graphics, printed out and rotoscoped onto the animation cels. Retroactively, this achieves exactly the same look as modern-day cel-shaded animation.
 * Team Fortress 2 uses a lighting system which falls somewhere between cel-shading and realistic lighting. While the line between lit and unlit is stronger than a realistically-lit scene, it's also fuzzier then a cel-shaded one. The game's shaders also include ones for directional ambient light sources above and below the characters in addition to the standard lighting (ambient lighting is usually just handled by adding a constant amount of light to all lighting calculations regardless of the direction a surface is pointing so shadowed surfaces don't turn out black).
 * Okami uses a fairly unique rendering method involving flowing liquid shadows meant to look like ink. Although in still shots it looks slightly similar to cel-shading, the actual technique, and the appearance in motion, is completely different (notably it isn't tied to light sources, instead being closer to ambient occlusion).