Intro

Anime Shading Plus (+), or ASP for short, is a Unity plugin specially designed for rendering anime-style characters. It helps game developers render 3D characters in the Unity engine with a style close to traditional cel-shading or even more stylized anime character.

Why Anime Shading Plus

Toon shaders are one of the most widely used shader types in Unity, and there are countless discussion and articles about toon shader on the Internet. However, over the years, I feel that there is no plugin that meets all of the following conditions at the same time:

• Shader dedicated to rendering JRPG, anime-style characters
• ShadowMap specially drawn for cel-shaded characters to prevent ugly self shadowing.
• Good inner and outer outline effects (Screen Space Outline and Mesh-based Outline for characters)
• Post-processing effects for JRPG, anime-style characters (e.g. Tonemapping)
• Special handling of multiple light sources and ambient lighting (indirect light sources) for cel-shaded characters
• Option to mix standard PBR and toon shading.
• Additional tools to improve workflow such as face shadow map baking tool and smoothed normal baking tool for mesh-based outline.

However, I believe that each of these feature is indispensable for achieving high-quality JRPG-like, anime-style character rendering. Therefore, I decided to integrate the above functions into a single plugin on the URP pipeline of Unity.

I believe that this plugin has the stability/performance/completeness to be a production-ready product for PC platforms. At the same time, it can also be used as a based shader to extend upon, for projects that require anime style characters.

Feature Highlights