Paper Mario animations

[E-Man]

That's not bad, Shyguy. After looking at your example and taking into account everything you said, I finally pinpointed the problem with my cel shading. The problem isn't that the light sources are inconsistent or I'm mapping the surface incorrectly. Instead, I'm attempting to adapt my usual shading method into cel shading and I'm overestimating (and occasionally underestimating) how much the cel shading should cover. Typically, what I would do is have the shadow expand and shrink depending on how much light is striking that part of the surface. As the shadow advances into a lighter area of the surface, the shadow thins. I wanted to replicate that by having the shadow climb up the back of the head and taper off when it enters the lighter part of the head. Unfortunately, that effect only looks good with air brush shading because the shadow is also supposed to get lighter as it treads into lighter areas, and cel shading lacks that kind of dynamic aspect. With that said, if I tackle cel shading again, a smarter idea is omitting the light shades completely and only draw the darkest shadows instead.

By the way, I made some new progress. This time, it's for the Goombas.



I'm uncertain about certain colors, so I placed them both in just to see which one works better. Also, I tried giving Goombario a smaller head, but since it looked weird, I'll probably just end up scaling him down completely in Maya if I want to still commit to my previous idea of changing his size compared to Goompapa.