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Isn't that just Half-Lambert that Valve came up with for Half-Life?

"To soften the diffuse contribution from local lights, the dot product from the Lambertian model is scaled by ½, add ½ and squared. The result is that this dot product, which normally lies in the range of -1 to +1, is instead in the range of 0 to 1 and has a more pleasing falloff. "

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Half_Lambert

It is. Takes me back to asking valve about this for my bachelor thesis 15 years ago and getting a personal reply from Gabe Newell who CC’d the developer who came up with the formula, him being all giggly whether I also want to know about skeletal animation that he came up with or the lip sync stuff. Fun guys

The art style under "A Sillier Solution" [1] reminds me very much of the cover of Dragon Magazine #100, August 1985 [2].

[1] https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/media/a-silly-diffuse-shadin...

[2] https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonM...

If it looks good, it's correct.

A silly diffuse shading model