>>44017068Rendering the models with a plastic material shader is the easiest thing you can do, which they've already done remember, in lgpe. Arguably crafting a custom toon shader is more hard when considering having to make the normal maps to direct lighting to achieve the 2d look they were going for which can be a fiddly process since it's not a common industry technique like baking details are, so there's not as many tools on the market to do so. A lot of indie animation studios whom use toonshaders for a semi 2d look often use a third party software for this reason, but I doubt GF went down that route and did it in house instead. using toon shaders is by default approached with a degree of intentionality, as the bog standard for videogames are to use realistic materials, or if more cartoony a pixar style. With the gen 6 and 7 games art style was no question, the shader was undoubtedly trying to emulate the official art to varying success. This philosophy probably continued through to gen 8, but to be speculative I would imagine they wanted their to be a "jump" between generations, and to make the new games stylistically distinct.
>How can you be sureUnless you have a written statement by GF you can't, but I can make educated guesses based on working in this field. You can see artistic intent in the concept art even for sword and shield (I don't mean the reference sheets.) in the location art that ended up following through to the finished game in some spirit, and this is typically true for all productions.
