text: wuthering waves came out this past weekend, and for anybody that doesnt know. yes. its just genshin impact again. i like studying anime art in 3d, so i overanalyze a lot of these kinds of games, even if they’re all basically the same.
  first things first, the modeling style for these characters are identical to the kind you’d find when ripping open Genshin Impact, or Tower of Fantasy, or any other 3D gacha game out there. VRoid’s models also have the same face style, but unlike VRoid, the hair is designed not to clip, which helps keep the outlines nice and tidy.
  Here’s what one of the characters (Lingyang) looks like in Blender.
  Compared to another character from Mihoyo’s upcoming game, Zenless Zone Zero.
  You can notice how similar the contours are, the density is pretty similar, and the hair’s constructed using similar practices. This style is pretty formulaic, and if you obtain nearly any model from a 3D anime game, it’ll look exactly like this. The main differences are in the construction of the mouth, eyes, and hair. notable exception being anything made from arc-system-works, who stands completely unique in every part of their process.
  lastly i want to talk about the shading. WuWa appears to use a strange method that I’ve seen explained in the past by Nhij Quang on youtube.
  the shadows are generated using a gradient texture, each level of gray represents a degree of shadow from left-right (and has to be mirrored later). you basically draw the outline levels.
  image found inside the files…
  its a little weird to conceptualize, so if you’re interested in it you should look at the video. ive tried this method before and i honestly didnt really like it, but compared to editting normals its a lot simpler.
  these were just some things i studied the other day, but let me know if you have any other questions about this kind of stuff, or if theres any other similar games that i should deep-dive into!