How would you go about making a stylized skin shader like this?

[u/Mixed_Martial_Autism]

I've watched abou 1000 different tutorials about making stylized shaders, but they mostly cover either realistic skin shading, overwatch style skin texturing or Straight up anime Cel shading. None of them get close to this específic style of shading that you see in some never gacha games.

I already know How to set up a Basic Toon shader, and have been able to improvise some shaders that get Close to this, but nome of them managed to hit the Same result. I know a decent part of this final result are textures painted by hands. But as you can see in the Second imagem there are also shadows and highlights created by the shader itself.

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[u/NoisyChain]

It doesn't seem like a complex shader, it's a toon shader with smooth edges and cast shadows and some custom subsurface scattering with a mix of fresnel on some specific spots and painted textures. The face looks flat because of custom normals, you can approach it in various ways. The rimlights are a basic fresnel effect as well

[u/Cralzy_]

Go watch 2 Am on youtube for this. He's literally the best at it. And there was also some other video which's thumbnail had a text "Face hole?" as far as I remember that one was really good too. It is more advanced with technique so it may be more useful. They use custom normals on faces for example. And they literally go about every single thing in the video. Kt is super detailed. HIGHLY recommend 👍👍👍

[u/_the_wall_ → u/Cralzy_]

I'm pretty sure the "Face hole?" video is by Noggi, he makes good anime Blender videos

[u/Octomin08]

It like maybe a part of the textures of the model?

[u/StinglEnemy]

[u/worrmiesroo]

It's soft shading - basically a combination of N dot L shading, baked ambient occlusion, and hand painting. All emission, not principled bsdf - the texture is doing the heavy lifting. Look up the 2amgoodnight YouTube channel and the GDC talk on genshin impact - those should answer your questions.

Also the edges aren't fresnel but rather inverted hull.

[u/AMDDesign]

High quality texture work. It's just very gradual and subtle shading. The toon shading itself isn't the magic here.

[u/drbomb]

I believe all of those shorts are AI. So at least keep in mind when trying to reach this target.

[u/Swift0sword → u/drbomb]

Just put the 3rd image through one of those AI detector websites and it came back at 95.7% AI. Was sure this was just with ripped models, but I guess not