Cel shading

The Sega Dreamcast title Jet Set Radio, which was revealed at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show, drew media attention for its cel-shaded style.

Since the early 2000s, many notable video games have made use of this style, such as Cel Damage (2001), The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002) and Ōkami (2006).

Cel shading, in contrast to other visual styles such as photorealism, is often used to lend a more artistic or fantastical element to a video game's environment.

"[6] Producer Atsushi Inaba recalls in a 2004 interview that Clover Studios had "abandoned the realistic style" for Ōkami as they became inspired by traditional Japanese art.

"[7] Takizawa also argues that photorealistic graphics, in contrast, would have "had the adverse effect of making information difficult to represent game-wise.

A representation of a spacesuit from The Adventures of Tintin comic Explorers on the Moon with a basic cel shader (also known as a toon shader ) and border detection
graphics complex of a seashell with toon shading modeled in Mathematica 13.1
Graphics complex of a seashell with toon shading modeled in Mathematica 13.1
Cel-shaded rendering of two isosurfaces of the probability density of a particle in a box