What is cel shading? Hard shadows, from Borderlands to Guilty Gear

Cel shading is a way of lighting a game so that shadows have hard edges. Normal 3D lighting fades smoothly from light to dark across a surface. Cel shading snaps that fade into a few flat bands: usually one lit color and one shadow color. The name comes from celluloid, the clear sheets that animators painted cartoons on by hand, where every shadow was a flat shape painted in one color.

StyleDex has 92 games tagged with cel shading. They range from fighting games that look like anime to a horror co-op game about scrap collecting.

Look at Gohan's face above. The light side of his skin is one flat peach. The shadow side is one flat darker peach, and the line between them is a hard edge. His cheek has no soft gradient, and there's no fuzzy shading where his hair meets his forehead: just two flat colors and a crisp line.

How cel shading works

A normal game engine works out how bright each point on a model should be, then draws that exact brightness. A cel shader does the same sum, then rounds the answer. Anything brighter than a cut-off point gets the light color. Anything darker gets the shadow color.

Because the shadow is a shape with an edge, artists can control it the way an animator would. They can push a shadow to sit under the nose in a clean triangle, or keep it off a character's face entirely in a close-up. Arc System Works became known for this in Guilty Gear Xrd, where artists hand-adjusted the shading on their 3D models so that key poses and close-ups matched how the characters would be drawn on paper. GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- carries that approach on.

Most cel-shaded 3D games also draw outlines around their models. Rounding the shadows makes a character look flat, and a dark line around the edge gives the shape back. StyleDex tags this separately as 3D outline shader, and 28 games in the dex have both. You can browse them on the cel shading with outline shader page.

Two tones or many bands

The dex splits cel shading into two common forms.

Two-tone cel shading uses one light color and one shadow color. It's the most common form by a long way: 61 of the 92 games. It's the anime look, and it's why Persona 5 Royal and the Dragon Ball fighting games read like an animated series.

Multi-band cel shading steps the light through three or more hard bands. It keeps the graphic look but gives forms more volume. Hades is a good example: characters carry a light band, a mid band and a deep shadow, which suits Supergiant's heavy, painted style.

Lethal Company is a less obvious case. It's a first-person horror game, nothing like a cartoon, but its light also falls in stepped bands. With outlines, heavy fog and a low render resolution on top, it looks like grainy security-camera footage.

Cel shading in 2D games

The term comes from 3D rendering, but the idea comes from 2D animation, and plenty of 2D games use it: flat shadow shapes painted on top of flat color. In the dex, 49 cel-shaded games are 2D, more than the 35 that are stylized 3D.

Spiritfarer paints its characters and boats this way, with one clean shadow tone under each shape. Pizza Tower does it louder, with thick black outlines and frantic, rubbery animation that looks like a 90s cartoon.

When the shadows are ink

A few games push cel shading toward comic books. Instead of a darker version of the base color, the shadow becomes solid black ink, sometimes with hatching along its edge. Telltale's The Walking Dead borrowed the look of the comic it's based on, with inked edges on 3D characters.

Darkest Dungeon II goes further. Its shadows are almost all black, and the color shows only where light hits.

If that's the look you're after, bold ink lines is the tag to browse. 29 of the dex's cel-shaded games also have it.

The Borderlands case

Borderlands 2 is probably the best-known cel-shaded shooter. Gearbox moved the series to this look late in the first game's development, repainting its textures with hand-drawn detail and adding thick ink outlines. The textures stay dense and gritty, full of scratches and grime, which gives Borderlands the look of an adult comic book.

Compare its palette with Persona 5's. Borderlands lives in dusty oranges and browns, while Persona leans on hard red and black, and the same shading method ends up setting two very different moods.

Why studios pick it

Realistic lighting dates as hardware improves, but flat shadow bands look much the same ten years later, so cel-shaded games age well. Hard shadows and outlines also keep characters easy to pick out in a busy fight, which is a big part of why fighting games and co-op shooters use them. And a 3D team can model and animate as usual, then present the result as illustration. For licensed anime games, cel shading is close to required.

It has a cost. A cel-shaded face can look wrong from angles the artists didn't plan for, because one shadow band in the wrong place reads as a smudge. Arc System Works deals with this by adjusting shadows by hand for each camera angle that matters.

Games to study

These are the most popular cel-shaded games in the dex, mixing 2D, 3D, two-tone and multi-band:

For smaller games that use it, try Brotato, Fallout Shelter and The Henry Stickmin Collection.

Prompt phrase

If you're writing an image prompt or briefing an artist, StyleDex's phrase for this style is "cel shading, hard-edged shadow bands". For the anime version, use "two-tone cel shading" and add "3D models with drawn outlines". Every tag page has its phrase ready to copy, starting with cel shading.