Arslan: Warriors of Legend

In an attempt to better understand how Omega Force at Koei have managed to make such a good looking anime game, I decided to also get my hands on a PC version of it to rip it apart. This is just the first stage of ripping, and further posts on this game will be made soon.

This image already gives us a good idea about how the game is textured to give the anime effect. The textures are very simple and largely block colours on the characters, while the environment looks to be either heavily filtered photos or hand-painted textures, not to dissimilar to other titles from Koei.
The image shown above is actually not the right colours as seen in-game, which is strange. XnView does however, see the image file as it appeared originally. The file does have an extra channel showing a cut-out mask for a cartoon-style, but applying this with any kind of layer styling still doesn't recreate the way it looks in game, so I'm not sure how it works yet. It looks as though the layer is simply set to Darken or Multiply, but that doesn't correct the colour, nor is the colour a direct invert of what is seen above.

This is the shot from XnView:

Here we have the specularity pass. Notice again that the environment is really somewhat standard, while the characters themselves appear to not use a dedicated specular map. Instead, they are simply filled with white, which would give a very flat, shiny look if they weren't cell-shaded afterwards.

We can see however, that everything in the game world still uses normal maps to give a fake sense of resolution. The characters of course also use these, but the results of the bump are posterized to fall in-line with the anime look.

There is also a separate ambient occlusion pass to the game renderer, but note that this is not it. This came out along with the diffuse colour pass as a 4th channel. It appears to be some kind of mask that is used to cut the shadows and highlights up to make them look like an anime, which is interesting. 

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Initial finding from this first rip show no signs of actual texture maps that aren't related to particles, which is odd. The textures shown on the characters appear not to have been ripped, nor do the models. In fact, the only models that came out were particles once again, which is odd.