Impression Change of a Female Character in Illustration by Shadow

Abstract: Recently, anime-touch illustrations became very popular as well as anime in Japan. In anime and anime-touch illustrations, shadows are used to express the emotions of characters and those which are not physically correct are frequently used. In the present study, it is examined that the impression changes of a female character by shadow expressions including the shadows physically incorrect. In the video game CUSTOM ORDER MAID 3D2, a player creates characters using 3D modeling. A female character with the simplest clothes was selected for the present study, and the shadows were produced with the 26 directions of the light sources. Then, these 3D pictures were traced as 2D illustrations. The physically incorrect shadows included the cases with the lights on the face, hair or eyes from a virtual source. Also, a stimulus with no shadow was prepared. In total 30 stimuli were prepared for a perceptual experiment. Twelve students of Kanazawa Institute of Technology participated in the experiment. Each participant sat on a chair in a darkroom and watched each stimulus presented on the display EIZO Flex Scan SX2462W. Then, the participant was requested to rate the impressions for the stimulus using 18 semantic differential scales. The rated scores were averaged and used for factor analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the impression space was spanned by friendliness, powerfulness and naturalness factors with the cumulative contribution ratio of 82.1%. The character was perceived as friendly when the shadow was produced with a light source set in front of the character. Contrarily, the character was perceived as not friendly when the light source was set behind the character.The friendliness may deeply correlate with the shadow on the face. The character became powerless when the light source was in the central position and powerful when the source was in the lateral positions. It is thought that the powerfulness correlates with the solidity of the character. The character was perceived as natural when the source was in foreground or background of the character. The naturalness may correlate with the shadow covering a part of the eyes. Among the physically incorrect shadow expressions, the stimulus with the eyes shined in the shadow was perceived as quite powerful and unnatural. The results of the present study will contribute to production of impressive illustrations and anime.

Keywords: Illustration, Anime, Shadow

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004997

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