 So, today we are officially closing the Anime Tutorial series, and I just wanted to share some very unexpected things that I learned while practicing this art style. Some of the things you are not very obvious, and I think before you adopt this style, there's a few things you really need to know ahead of time. Now my perspective on the Guilty Gear Anime Shaden style has completely changed from when I started learning it two years ago. I originally chose to learn this style because I assumed it would be faster than And also because I love anime. But as I got deeper and deeper into it, I started realizing that it has some unexpected benefits and unexpected drawbacks that I don't really see anyone talking about. The best way I can describe this art style is, once you get good at it, then yeah, it's really fast. Compared to the average two weeks it takes for most professionals to make a photorealistic character, it takes me about five to six days to finish a character in this Guilty Gear Anime style. So once you're good at it, it's pretty fast. However, that is once you get good at it. Being good at this style takes a really, really, really long time. Just to give you my own personal experience, I had the original model for the character done a long time ago, and I wanted to apply the Guilty Gear Anime style to her. But the first thing I learned is I had to spend a lot of time redoing all my topology because normal topology does not allow for perfect anime facial lighting. From there it took me about three or four months to get comfortable with the square UV texture and style, a few more months to understand how to most efficiently slant the UVs to fake that hand-drawn look, and probably the most difficult part was another three or four months before I could start to grasp the idea of artificially controlling all the normals. This part took the longest because it's the most frustrating and you really feel like you spend entire day after day after day feeling like you made absolutely no progress at all. After about four to five months of literally fighting shadows, I was never able to master the art of perfect facial lighting, and I definitely didn't even come close to the professional quality that most of us are used to seeing, and the patrons and I ended up hiring professionals in order to edit the normals properly. And I think it's important for you to be able to tell the difference between cheap anime shading and true professional guilty gear anime shading. Low level shading is when people just take a normal 3D model, give it a two-tone material, slap on a basic outline and call it anime. But that is really the cheapest, most superficial way you can do it, because it doesn't have square UVs, it doesn't have a slanted fake hand-drawn look, and it definitely doesn't have adjusted normals. The more skilled user will be able to make better models that will probably be able to fool you from far away, but when you start to check the model from other angles, the aesthetic will really start to fall apart. Now there are some people who get really close and can make it look good from almost every angle, but here is how you can tell the difference between a professionally done 3D anime character and an amateur 3D anime character. A properly professional shaded anime model will have perfect facial lighting from every direction. It doesn't matter where the light is, all of the face normals have been manually adjusted to ensure that every single angle gives that classic anime shading and includes the Rembrandt Triangle. If you compare this to amateur default normals or badly adjusted normals, it then becomes really obvious whether this character was done professionally or not. There is a reason why professionals charge you $2,000 per character for this art style. And that's because there are maybe four people on the planet who you can place commission orders from to get a character done this way. And these people are so busy. The commissions are always so full. One of the guys I know said that he had enough commissions lined up for the next six months and he's still getting messages for new ones all the time. This simply aren't a lot of people on the planet who have the skills needed to make characters in this style. Now you can get around this a little bit like I just gave up the perfectly adjusted normals for a more simple VTuber style face shading. But in the back of my mind, it still kind of bugs me knowing that the face normals aren't exactly completed yet. And I can't really afford to spend the next six months of my life doing nothing but practicing fighting shadows. I'd rather spend that time sculpting characters or in animation. It takes a long time before you start to become competent in this art style. And you have to forget everything you thought you knew about topology and shading in order to accomplish it. But once you do, like I said, it can be pretty fast and it looks really cool once it's complete. But the second unexpected challenge I didn't see anyone talking about is asset compatibility. If you are working on a project, you can't just have one character anime shaded. If you do this style at all, you have to do it all the way or else it looks like shit. So if you're doing anime characters, then you're probably gonna need an anime style environment, anime props and anime style special effects. And this is where I found my biggest challenge. As many of you know, I wanted to make my next game project in anime style. And I plan to stay true to that pledge. But if I had to be honest, it has seriously constrained me as a developer. For example, while I can personally make one character every six days, a lot of developers import, download or purchase assets that they don't have time to make themselves. But if you do an anime shading, you really don't have that option. Like, while you might be able to find a few anime style characters very well done that you can download or purchase online, it's almost impossible to find any anime style props. For example, normally if my game was in photorealism, if I wanted to add a lot of guns and weapons to my game, I can go online and buy 50, 4K high resolution production ready weapons for 18 bucks. And then quickly add those 50 weapons to my game. But I can't do that because everything in my game has to be in the same Guilty Gear anime style. I could download the 3D models, but then I have to spend a bunch of time re-squaring up all the UVs, redoing all the texture maps, applying the fake hand-drawn look. And I'd have to do that for every single weapon, which would on average shake me about three to four days per weapon. And I simply don't have that much time. So instead of having 50 different weapons in my game like something exciting you probably want to play, I can only have six because I only had time to apply the anime style to six different weapons. And it's kind of the same problem for everything else really too. For the game, I needed some alien looking enemies to represent the virus and germs that you fight in the game. But literally nobody in the world sells Guilty Gear shaded anime aliens. So again, instead of being able to go online and purchase a kit of ready to go production assets like a normal developer, the only enemies that are going to be in my game are the ones that I had time to make. Because the ones that I made are literally the only Guilty Gear anime shaded aliens in existence. It's the same thing for special effects. There are a lot of awesome special effects packs that you can find, but most of them are for photorealistic games. The best thing that I found is tune style special effects packs, but I still haven't had the time to really test it out thoroughly. So if you're a developer or a project manager and you're considering doing things in this style, just realize that you will not have the option of purchasing additional assets that you can easily plug into your project. At best, you can slap a two tone shader and draw an outline, but it'll usually just look like really cheap anime. However, there are some unexpected benefits to this style as well. Despite all the drawbacks, by far the most important thing that you get is beautiful looking animation. While it is probably easier to create something awesome in photorealism, the magic often disappears as soon as it starts to move. Meaning the screenshots will look great, but as soon as it starts to move, it starts to lose its beauty because people can usually tell them when a moving human is fake or real. But the Guilty Gear style is the opposite. It looks great in still images, but it looks even better in motion. So for most people watching, it just goes from cool to awesome. So my two senses basically, if you have a choice between the two styles, ask yourself, is your project for a portfolio? Is it gonna focus on still images? Or is it mainly gonna be in motion? If it's gonna be in motion, then the learning curve for the anime style shading might actually be worth the trouble. But if you're not sure and your team isn't really proficient in anime style yet, you'll probably have a much easier time in photorealism since all the assets available will be in the same style as your project by default. So I hope you find that information useful. Thank you so much for joining each video. It's been my pleasure to lead you through this crazy journey. And as of now, the anime series is complete. If you know anyone who's interested in learning this style or is interested in seeing how it works, please go ahead and share this playlist with them. All the tutorials on my channel are completely free. And that's all thanks to the patrons and members who support this channel each month. So please give them a round of applause because if it wasn't for their continued support, I really wouldn't be able to afford to keep making the content and sharing what I learned with you guys here. If you'd like to support, please consider joining the squad. They'll get lots of perks and I post a lot of updates behind the scenes and polls that allow you to vote on what direction you'd like to see the channel take in the future. But as always, up you have a fantastic day. Now, see you around.