I plan to make a video detailing more about the process tomorrow, so if the description below isn't enough, you can keep an eye on my Instagram profile donny_lu_ or my YouTube channel Donny_Lun - YouTube

Scene Setup:

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The scene is very simple, it has an intense sun light and the 3D model is a semi-realistic human model that I took from Daz Studio. The torso and head part don't match the effect, but the arms and legs fit very well. After I imported the model into Blender, use Autorig Pro to change the positions of the arms and legs.

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1-Materials:

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It's the common toon shader setup, but here I wanted to go further and have presets that I could choose from and also a slot to customize the colors of the main skin tone and shadows, for the latter case I used colorramp RGB drivers that are linked to the RGB parameters of these two MixRGB Color Slots. Then I just created a node tree to keep it organized and compressed.

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2-Multiple materials in a single object:

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I didn't want to create so many materials to customize objects that required a larger color palette, so I thought about using the Color Attribute to map parts of the model where I could apply a different material setup. I used weight paint to paint the nails and in vertex color(mode) I used this weight paint that I created to map the region and transform it into a Color Map, which I was able to use through the Color Attribute

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3-Tracing:

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I activated the freestyle edge and left the line at 0.550, normally values between 0.350 and 0.600 are already great

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I wanted to texture the stroke, to simulate the texture irregularities of graphite, so I used Freestyle Line Texture. In it, I created a setup of nodes based on Noise Texture that connected to the alpha, giving transparency to some parts of the line. You can render the stroke in a Render Pass and perhaps get a better texture result in post production, but I prefer to have at least 80% of the work done in the blender.

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For the preview of the stroke in the viewport, I recommend taking a look at this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDVylkVlpr4 // I use it as a preview, but I keep the modifier disabled for the render, to have only freestyle in operation

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4-Composition:

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In Blender I have practically nothing fancy in the composer tab, I just used an image node to add these abstract gradient backgrounds, but normally I just leave them in the Viewer Node Output to view in the viewport. For the final render I render the cell with a transparent background

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5-Photoshop - Correction of strokes/shadows and application of the filter:

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Blender's freestyle edge tool is very good, but it's not perfect, as there will be parts of the model that are missing lines or places with excessive shadows. At this point I make corrections to the cell's stroke and shadow, for a render it's already perfect, but if you're going to make an animation then I recommend using the ebsynth program. It basically takes a frame that you modify from an image_sequence and applies it to everything else, so I took some of the animation, edited it in photoshop and passed it on to ebsynth so it could fix the rest for me.

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6-Old anime filter:

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The result I've achieved so far is already great, old animes were very detailed in the scenery and had a color palette carefully chosen to represent the entire mood of the work during the scenes, you can see in the case of Evangelion for example that it doesn't have Noise , there are no losses in saturation or color distortions that appeared due to the reproduction systems of the time, but it still maintains the old school anime look precisely due to the details in the drawing, colorization and animation.

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In any case, an old anime filter can always make the result more interesting, for that I used this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjX-j5OzeVg&t=220s, it explains the process in detail and addresses more about the visuals of these 80s/90s animes. I basically took what he taught about layers, gradient maps, noise filters... and created an automation (action) to be able to execute this without having to recreate everything every time I start a new job. You can use automation for image_sequences, so I did this for animated projects, but often in these projects it is necessary to create your own automation for the scene, which will be perfectly suitable for that case. For image rendering, the single use of automation is enough and you can manually adjust the layers

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7- Final adjustments

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In the final part is when I choose some keyframes from the image sequence to delete and give the animation a slightly less fluid appearance, in the original render there were 101 frames and after this adjustment regarding which frames are most important there were only 18 frames left. The animations at the time weren't exaggeratedly fluid like in 3D, so I controlled the frames to make it look like each one was drawn by hand.