@EliasDaler and the shadows project onto the geometry with some manually placed edge cuts to form the actual shadow to light transition. i would assume they had some sort of coverage / surface area checks as wellto prevent excess smudging of the shadows.
@EliasDaler If I had to guess, they probably generated the vertex colors from, the normals, a shadow map, and a palette / color ramp to map "lightness" to color. looks like the shadows only lower to about .5 lightness (the bottom side of that arch-looking thing is darker ...
@DaNgEr19203 Thinking about how when i made the small Mario model i made the him way too thin from the side cause it was just made to do the standing pose and nothing else