Hey everyone,
I’m trying to recreate this kind of style in Blender.
I’ve already implemented randomized face colors and also experimented with edge wear, but I keep getting one of two results: either the polygon edges stand out too much, or the whole thing looks too flat.
How can I achieve a result closer to the reference image?
Welcome 
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there are multiple ways also dpendeing on what renderengine you use.. even the Blender version might be “important”. The best way to get good suggestions is also to show what one already has “reached”, because often people are a bit reluctant to help when one does not know anything about “the context”.. in fact sometimes it seems even “bots” are asking to get some “data”.. if you know what i’m talkin about..
It seems the material uses soem environment map to not directly reflect it bu tuses it o change the whole face color a bit.. this may also explain this “highlights” on the edges..
Thank you for you answer Okidoki,
I’m using Blender 5.2. But I can move to any other version if it helps.
The same for the engine, I prefer the generic PBR stack/workflow, but can do a custom shading if needed.
Now in Blender I’m using Eevee render, geometry nodes, shading nodes.
Initially modelled in low-poly, but we can increase polycount if needed and bake texture layers back to low-poly for production.
Here is the current result and nodes. I don’t like it, feels like we need a different approach.
Hmm… interesting… but it’s “easier” to have a look into some blend file (maybe with reduced/restriceted geometry) than to rebuild some screen shot 
( You may to have spent a little more time in the forum to “level up” from ‘new users’ to be able to do so.. > 5MB; best to compress in save dialog → 
menu in the top left )
Here we go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1unixPjRE-QEo7BaA7ngVclHSIG6gn4vI/view?usp=sharing
IDK if it helps since the whole approach looks sketchy, and the stylization doesn’t really depend on the geometry itself.
I have to look into this later.. and.. i forgot to make a screenshot what i meant “above”… 
The bevel makes the edges softer and the geometry nodes are uses to make them “more reflective”.. the differences in light comes from some (random) environment light ( for this case it doesn’t even have to be an HDRI ).. some bit of “randomess” might be nice to add. But yours are much tooo complex and hard to “understand”… if there is somethign to understand.. (also i saw later that some of the node aren’t connected to any output.. so the “amount of nodes” just “scared me away” )
Just imagine to look at your setup in some weeks or even month later.. if you didn’t made some notes then this would be hard to understand later and you may ask yourself then: “What ?”
Thanks for taking a look at my blender-file. I tried quite a few different approaches there, but none of them gave me the result I was aiming for, so I didn’t really organize everything into proper node groups.
But yes, I agree, if I leave it like this for a while, it’ll probably be pretty hard to figure out later.
Regarding the shading, these are the main questions I have:
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The pants obviously shouldn’t be metallic, but for some reason I still get a strong impression that the shading on them looks somewhat metallic. Should I actually try to achieve that look using the Metallic parameter, or is that the wrong approach?
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I think the bevel is mainly needed to add edges with smoothed normals so they can catch reflections/specular better. But I’m not sure whether they’ll catch reflections as strongly as in the reference without any additional modification, or whether I should somehow assign an extra parameter/mask to those edges and use it to boost the specular response.
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I’m also not sure whether this kind of look can be achieved with the default PBR nodes, or whether it really requires some kind of custom toon shading. What do you think?
The metallic look might come from the very reflective edges.. i espcially did not used a too white color for this.. of course one could also control the reflection more by any metallic, specualr, roughness values to your liking.. so there is no “wrong” but only “like”
“default PBR” ?? you are already using the Principled BSDF shader and not some Diffuse and Glossy shader mix.. 