How The Wind Waker Redefined Cel Shading

Let's figure out how The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was able to pull off cel shading at a time when nobody else was able to.

Extra VFX used:

Special thanks
💜 Will, Jewel, Jeremy, Mia, Argle Bargle
Additional special thanks
💙 Andre, LagoLunatic, Mike, SageOfMirrors, LordNed, Xara, Creative Corner

00:00 Intro
02:32 How The Wind Waker Defined Cel Shading
17:29 Channel Update

[AgentMidnight]

I can't stress enough how fascinating it is to see these topics discussed as they affect game models in real time. It is honestly so cool to see the actual normal arrows shift and brighten as link's model animates. Keep up the good work!

[TheWrathAbove]

Seeing this video in my sub feed was surreal, it was like, who's this guy? And then upon checking the channel immediately realizing I need to watch this video now.

[reamuji]

i think we could say that wind waker aesthetic is ahead of its time, when everyone goes into the same realism style nintendo brave enough to explore outside the vault and the result is a beautiful game that win against testiment of time

[FargazerMusic]

The segment beginning at 5:00 is one of the best examples of visual aid I have ever seen. Outstanding work!

[penntopaper]

as an artist, the thing about how they manually picked every single shading and lighting color is incredibly impressive and genuinely made me so happy. i love this game even more now

[AndrewPRoberts]

Something I noticed in BOTW is that the shadows of the entire world will match the shadow color of wherever Link is standing. If you stand under a red awning, the shadows on you are red, but then the rest of the world also has red shadows now too. I always thought that was really interesting and I'd love to learn more about how the lighting system in BOTW works

[randomcatdude]

That texture at 9:08 is also how Team Fortress 2 gives its character models a distinct, illustrative look. In the Source engine that TF2 runs on, it's referred to as a lightwarp texture, and there it can also have color, so the lighting can also be tinted based on its luminance. Really cool stuff.

[javaguru]

I'm still bitter about how badly this game was treated when it came out :(
This has always been my favorite Zelda!

[Finkelfunk]

This video is made with such an incredible effort. The animation, the explanation, just everything all put together.
You take a topic that sounds pretty boring and turn it into something fascinating.
You deserve all the success that is gonna come to you. Superb video quality, great job. Keep it up! :)

[pujp]

Would you be up for exploring how Breath of The Wild expanded on these ideas?

[landonhagan]

I had no idea so much work and finesse went into Wind Waker's are style. Creating dynamic color pallets for everything in the world, just so they could curate the colors they wanted. That's the kind of craftsmanship and artistry that makes Nintendo games so timeless. (PS I know you just finished this and have gone on a break, but I'd love to see a similar deep dive on how Skyward Sword's graphics work. In my mind, it's the most beautiful Zelda game but there's not a lot of stuff covering it in detail)

[wardo]

"...the vertexes position."


Toon link standing in the background while all of his skin just has a quick seizure

[PJiggles]

Wind Waker has been one of my favorite games of all time ever since I was a kid, and this video taught me so much about it and me me appreciate it a lot more. Thanks for the amazing explanations!

[koffi_duck]

this video is astonishingly well done HOLY SHET

[IlSharmouta]

14:30
Love the in depth talk about the pros and cons of either Automatically creating a color pallet, or Manually choosing pallets of color for the numerous different cases.
One thing I will say from development experience, is that there were probably a lot of both going on, even when it looks all manually done in the end. We see a result of what looks like laboriously hand choosing individual colors for many scenes, but I imagine they had tools on their end to, say, put in one or two main input colors and generate sets of colors that they were then able to tweak as they saw fit, quickly making the many final pallets.

Like you mentioned, harmony between the programming side and the art side is critical, not only in development of the game itself, but also in development of tools to use on their side while working. Any tools the art team can get the programming team to write to help speed up the process saves time and money and is great to look into as much as possible.

Side note, it would have been great to see the final implementation of these pallets, like you showed the ZAtoon file. Were the scene's color pallets a similar file? did they combine a lot into a main file? I was quite curious to see more files like that.

[XgamerdaveX]

Jet set radio on Dreamcast uses cel shading as well and it looks awesome. It came out before wind waker too.

[dougr]

First time I remember seeing cel shading was jet set radio

[TrueBlur]

I’m happy to see another video from you! I’ve rewatched the Mario Galaxy one so many times!

[leowatley]

if any game 'defined' cel shading, there is no question it was jet set radio.

[harryrobinson]

This is incredible man, graphical techniques are so cool what the hell