How to create the classic Anime style look

Creating the classic Anime look is a popular style for many fans of the genre. To achieve this look, there are a few things we need to understand about the ART and the MEDIUM. There’s a third factor which is “TIMELY” trends, but we’ll get to that later.

I’m an artist and I love creating anime style characters. But lately, I’ve been feeling really frustrated with my work. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get that perfect anime look. The black lines are always too thick and the colors are always off. And I feel like I’m over-designing my characters. They just don’t look right.

Fortunately, experimenting in Blender with the realtime compositing features, helps us to explore quicker development for Anime stylized look that involves shaders+materials and composition.

The Yor model was created by me, along with the shaders + nodes
The Yor Background was created by ArsXC
The Robot model and rig was created by Takuto_Blast
The Streletzia model and rig was created by yours truly (me).

Here are the files for study purposes:

MECH (General public) FILE>>
STRELEZIA (General public) FILE>>
YOR (NSFW, as public visiting the site shows it’s 25-35 age) FILE >>

Watch the video to learn how to APPEND the node to your own scene and use it.

Even though getting the classic retro anime look is hard, it will help tremendously if you have a solid knowledge base to understand how professional looking 2D Stylized toon shaders are made in Blender for 3D animation. You can visit this course I created if you’d like more details.
If you are using Blender’s realtime compositor or compositing anime in any other software like After Effects, here are my recommendations for Anime projects using 3D with the retro 2D look:

Controlling the look with imperfections

1. Use only thin lines. Line wiggle-ness is created by the amount of tint accumulating from the distance of the brush to the cell to draw before accentuating the ink/paint. This is the core fundamental of the classic anime style look.
2. Color palette. The characters have a pre-defined color palette based of their environment. How much of a saturated / un-saturated color balance you use with your character against the environment will determine the iconic look of Classic Anime style.
3. Wiggle lines. When the characters move, the lines cannot be straight or consistent, we see this a lot because of the digital medium, but in traditional hand drawn (frame by frame animation), there is a little bit of “noise wiggle” per frame as it represent the human-hand trace imperfections and inconsistencies.
4. Media “artifacting” – this is referred to the imperfections of the medium in which the animation will be represented. You can see these as (commonly referred), RGB displacement, Channel blurring, Signal noise, VHS stretching compression/ artifacting / noise, Signal scanlines, pixel distortion (ctr cathodes), and light leaks from the physical camera when capturing the hand drawn/painted cells.
5. Light and camera noise. There are physical elements such as light leaks from certain colors to the edges of the frame. This is because the plates that used to be surrounding the cell were often reflective. To minimize this effect the room had to be as much dark as it could. But this often had the opposite effect on the cell, and taken that the vapor in the room could be present at cold weather, you can see the reflection of light leaks filling back the borders of the frame. Dust and mist also contributed to the light-blinking factor
6. Fresh paint “layering”, Fresh paint over-bordering. You can see this in 80’s cells when 2 colors meet, sometimes the fresh paint will mix with each other, creating a darker (or lighter) color at the borders. This particularly helped the “fringes” we see at some of the edge borders of the character (light reflecting off the cell and air space between plates).
7. Grain – Traditional FILM has to be revealed using a combination of chemicals and a “dark room” usually accompanied by a red light. Depending on the quality of the “film” you can see the graininess through the animation. There are different (most commonly used) film profiles like Kodak and Konica. Depending on the date, these chemicals will tint the picture mostly in red or green (often times giving us saturated orange or cyan colors), which is why we get the “nostalgic film look” phrase from.
8. Overblown brightness. Sometimes the ink layer was so thin, that you can see how the back-lighting over-blows the whites and lighter colors (like yellow). To prevent this “blooming” effect, color palettes had to have “lower” saturation tones so that when the camera and lights photographed the cell, it will not “bloom” the whites. In turn, black lines became gold-tinted when they had a nearby saturated color. This is the result we get when we do a “blur” and then “Multiply” in our digital composition.
9. The “style” itself. The most influential anime work series and their iterations, came from renowned artists. I will construct a better list than the link provides, since we live in the ai era and you need to target artist’s legacy correctly.
10. There’s a depth of field on medium to close up shots created to emphasize attention to detail on the character’s body or face. This is also used as a mask to define a gradient to separate the character as a means of “manual exposition” if you will, in order to make the character contrast against (or in favor) of the light direction in the scene or the integration with the background. This “manual depth of field” effect is achieved by applying different subtle amounts of blur to background elements, as if it was a Zdepth pass, except it feels “2D”, flat, layered. This is desired in Anime composition. It doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be “felt” that way.
11. Chromatic aberration appears to some special cases like a vignette effect and for the same reason, to create attention to the central part of the frame and fringe the outer regions as a secondary elements of attention. Chromatic aberration is also used for a retro look by displacing the RGB channel in a specific amount to give the composition a special distinguishing look. Most of these chromatic aberration presets can be found using After Effect’s Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks, similar to Blender’s “Enrich” addon presets for look and color.
12. Rimlight – If you pay very very close attention to classic anime, you’ll detect a fine line with a usually “higher” lighter color which will represent the “rimlight”. Again, this is a natural introduced error, since the black ink (outlines) once dried could not contain the colors surrounding in a perfect “bound”, you’ll see two classic issues: 1 – Colors smudge against black outlines (this is exactly what we love from the classical anime effect and we achieve it by blurring the original image, set oppacity to 50% and set the layer mode to multiply), and 2 – To avoid this first problem issue, some studios came up with the idea, to have the black inking from the front side of the acetate (cell) and the colors inked/painted in the back of the cell. This lead to the classical “golden border” issue we see in some animes, but it also meant that now, when the physical camera snapped the picture, there was light leak from the colored back part of the medium since light+colors create glow bounces in a very reflective medium (like the transparent acetate cell). Thus resulting in the classic “smearing” color effects we see in retro anime. Ultimately it became a decisive choice of style, to have a bold “rim light” painted on the characters (and hair) intentionally. This also marks a distinctive era of the 90’s anime.

The background is always aiming for a “dreamy effect” called “Soft glow”. This is a synonym of “elegance” in film. Probably it was first created by accident, and later on as a staple effect, as it “blurred” and it even affects the hand-drawn lines. This “bloom” was natural when the light (in the film) was a little bit over exposed in the physical machine, the dark room not being correctly setup, or even chemical composition on the movie’s reel when it was played back through the projector to be captured. Whatever the reason, I believe all these external factors may have had an influence on the “analog” look for the natural “soft glow” we see in classic animes from the 80’s and 90’s.

As to which part of this process was first introduced, it is clear, that it ADDs up to the previous effects and mediums as we’ve referred.

You’ve probably noticed that most of the retro anime look have a “blurred” style that we don’t see (much) in the modern era, that is posterior to 2004. The main reason why backgrounds and character have such blur effects is because the CTR displays of the TVs at the time:

• Could not display high definition consistent solid colors or lines due to refresh rate (aka image frequence). This is why the imperfection of the medium (aka Tv broadcasting machines, aerial signal noise) was taken as an advantage to “form the style”. The colors were formed in a combination for the signal in the CTR “pixels” screen definition, which you already know was around 320×240 of out modern time pixels. Sometimes tv signal were even “up sampled” from 210×170 transmission signal (but if the ratio was 1.33, the correct aspect ratio is supposed to be 210×158, why is there a difference of 12 “extra” lines? -The answer, my dear reader is called: hidden tv signals specifically designed for “intelligence” devices, rating measurements, and military purposes… but that’s material for another video or post).
• Catode tvs had a very “imperceptible” but present “blinking” of greens and yellow that affected how we saw cartoons. (70’s and 80’s TVs) This is why most of the 70’s and 80’s fantasy anime shows explored the “Fantasy and Dark” themes so the colors will not present (the constant) chromatic aberration.
• This is why we also notice the forced “soft blur” in anime because that would represent better blending for the CTR color display of the era. All though in modern times, this is not necessary, there’s still an artistic inclination to continue to blur the definition of Anime series for background and characters as an esthetic choice.

When doing 3D monsters or mechas on screen, you need to take notice you still have to go through different processes to add “imperfections” and make it appear as a 2D hand drawn character:

• “straight” volumes and shapes cannot be linear. You need to “bulk” the edges, as to make it appear a little bit “rounder”, this is mostly because art-direction as a stylistic “friendlier” appealing shape to the eye. This is why 80% of 3d monsters or robots do not match “visual context” in some of the shows or movies
• Flat surfaces snap shadows “too quickly”. Again, this is a fail to understand: the more subdivisions you have the more “easy to flow” shadows you’ll have as your model turn away from light and creates self shadows
• Internal lines and model’s “outline” of materials is probably another 80 to 90% fail to comply with the visual context of the hand drawn animated style when a 3D model is integrated. This applies, even for background props or characters
• Robots NEED to have granulated gradients, to make them appear more “hand painted”. Even though you are using a shader to represent the surface, bear in mind a shader cannot “snap” by itself the properties of light spread over its topology more than what it can already do with the subdivision level it already has. In summary: you need to understand light cannot be spread in a gradient and give a “painterly look” if you don’t create texture (or material) imperfections for the robot’s surface. In other words: Always “grain” or “noise” , and then blur, your gradients for robots.
• Robots always NEED a defined GLOSSY or SPECULAR map. Don’t let the light “do the work for you”. As I mentioned before, you cannot allow automatic light propagation/calculation over the robot’s surface. You need to control (and art-direct) where you do want to your model’s specular lights to spread, hit or diffuse.
• Straight outlines for the model’s body or volume don’t look good. You need to add “thickness” and variations to the edges, by either increasing mass volume (making box pieces look chunky), or making rounder corner edges”.

This page will be constantly updating, so don’t forget to subscribe to my blog to get the notifications timely (yes, I will include a lot of pictures in this post) that will show you exactly what to look for to nail the perfect classic anime look.

If you liked this content, please let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Thank you for visiting and sharing this blog post.

-Pierre.

Academic Reference:
The Stylistic Evolution of Anime

When Anime Went Digital

The Evolution of Anime Character Designs

Japan’s best 3D Animation (Luppin III)

Forum research:
MAPPA’s composition (Why fans are salty about it)
MAPPA’s public perception about compositing

Blog Research:
Blur objects to enhance your Anime composites