Introduction

If you've ever disliked the way your cartoon or anime-styled avatar looks under certain lighting conditions then you may be dealing with the dreaded blob face! Cartoon and anime faces were never meant to be lit the way they're shaped, so ugly shadows from the nose, lips and recesses of the eyes give away the fact that you're looking at a 3D model and not an illustration.

A model's lighting conditions are calculated using its vertex normals, which is the outward-facing direction of a vertex. But we can manipulate these vertex normals to change the way the model is shaded however we want! Many Booth models are already using this technique, but for those that aren't or for models sourced outside of Booth that do not have the technique applied, this guide is a crash course on the quickest and laziest way to apply "good enough" custom normals to a model.

This guide assumes you already have and know how to use Blender, though not to a great extent. This isn't something you can do directly in Unity yet (as far as I know).

"Torahime", Custom Normals