   how do i render such a model
  Hey.ive been working on my engine for a while now and its slowly getting there. im using my own matrix and quaternion math, ive got a basic resource loader/unloader and a nice way to manage the scene graph and the camera but the most complex models ive rendered so far are models ive extracted from Final Fantasy 7 (<< old ps1 rpg) and the fanciest effect is 8 per pixel lights achieved with multipass rendering. So in other words ive only just scratced the surface of all of this :Ptoday i stumbled apon this .blend file:http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1593/wowg.jpgand i instantly fell in love with the idea of 3D japanese anime characters rendered like this one. so ive decided that my next goal would be to get my engine to render this model exactly the same way that blender does in the screenshot only in real time and later on also with animations.but i realy dont have an idea where to start!the way i went about it up til now was to load whatever i wanted to use in my engine into blender and then to export it as a ASE model, i would then use my own little conversion application to convert the ASE model into my engine's own file format (yes i like reinventing the wheel). However i dont think ASE model files are sufficent to store a model like this (thats just my gues so please correct me if im wrong) also i have no idea what methods are used to get this almoust hand drawn effect (for example the black outlines).i stil want to use my own model file format but i gues il have to expand it dramaticaly. I still want to take the blender file and export it to a inbetween file format from where il write another application to convert it into my engines own format. What format should i use for this?also what rendering techniques are used to achieve this? anything else you could maybe recomend i do?Thnx for Reading!   
  It's really hard to say what you need to do without knowing specific details about the model and rendering techniques used in the image.  On first glance, I would say that most of that model could be done with good old fashioned (but high-quality) texturing.  As for the black outlines you mentioned, that could be done quite easily using a shader... if the vector from camera to fragment is at an angle that is nearly 90 deg from the fragment's surface normal (ie almost parallel with fragment), set the color to black.  I'm just throwing an idea out there, but it should give you a starting point to tweak from.   ;  You could try the following combo:1) Fresnel2) Gooch3) Specular map.Of course that's on top of the standard vanilla phong shading model. I have not done anything like that, but it looks like it might work for you as I've seen some sample render that used those.Anyway...good luck.   ;  hmm. its probely is that simple. i just noticed that the archive i downloaded contained a folder of textures that covers pretty much the whole model. in that case il c if i can get it loaded into my engine first and then il try get the outline effect by doing what you recommended since it seems logical. i first thought the outlines would be something loaded into the model itself but i gues i was wrong.Thnx.;  Thnx dlangdev il google up those terms   ;  Another thing you may want to try googling is NPR rendering techniques. Should give you some interesting reading in these sorts of effects.   ;  I'd say that standart normal mapping would be satisfying (maybe with little tweaking), shadow maps and some phong on eyes, edges are very simple - ever heard of post processing edge-detection filters, Sobel Filter? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobel_operatorUse edge detection on depth of the scene (plus some tweaking) and after correct blend with scene (in post processing shader) you'll get nice black edges.Use them ;)   ;  thnx. i should be able to take it from here :P   