Stylized Rendering (NPR / cel-shaded)

Build the stylized look of a character-action game in the anime-cel lineage. Primary references (all with public tech talks or well-documented reverse-engineering): Guilty Gear Xrd (Arc System Works, GDC 2015 — the canonical primary source), Genshin Impact / Honkai: Star Rail (miHoYo, GDC 2021 + community RE), Hi-Fi Rush (Tango, GDC 2024 — documents the SDF face method), Zelda BotW (Nintendo, GDC 2017 — painterly anti-cel), Team Fortress 2 (Valve, NPAR 2007 — half-lambert, warm/cool shadows).

A stylized look is art direction expressed through shading math, then frozen into authored data: ramps, channel-packed control maps, smoothed normals, SDF face maps, hand-edited vertex normals. The renderer is the cheap part — the look lives in the authored maps. Plan the art pipeline, not just the shader.

Excluded (separate skills): web/React screen-space shaders (shaders), full- site palette extraction (extract-theme), in-engine VFX/particles, animation. Engine-wide practice: unity6-aaa-best-practices / ue5-aaa-best-practices.