My 2009 demo reel is up! Featuring some of my latest work and also all time favorites.
The second half of the video shows how to use Celulight and Normality to shade a 2D cel, which would be one hell of a task to do by hand but is peanuts for this powerful duo.
At long last, I’ve found some time to post on my personal website again. Celulight and Floodgate have been finalized a long time ago, and so has a new version of Normality, with some amazing new features and much better integration of all its various effects.
I’ve also made a decision that will disappoint some readers and users of my software: The new versions of my After Effects plug-ins will not be released publicly. I have a variety of reasons for this decision; one being that my previous experiences with selling plug-ins for After Effects did not amount to anything that would have made the chores that go along with it worthwhile. At the same time, I put so much work and effort into the software that not using them would be not only a shame, but also foolish.
However, the main reason the plug-ins are not available to the public is that I spent the better part of this rainy summer preparing for the opening of our own animation shop, Studio Lampion. I believe that my software will benefit our work, pipeline and clients in more ways than one and giving this advantage out of our hands can’t be a clever move.
So there it is: I’m finally opening my own animation studio! Certainly a dream come true and something I’ve been thinking of for a very long time.
Studio Lampion is an animation studio in the heart of Berlin, Germany, founded by my good friend Matthias Koenig and myself. In the long term, we’ll be focusing our attention on non-photorealistic animation for film and TV, but for starters we’ll be bidding on anything we feel capable of producing. So if there’s anything you need done animation-wise… drop me a line!
Lots of people have requested images of Celulight in action because they’re not quite sure what it does, so I’ve decided to post some renders from the images I use to test the plug-in’s various effects and parameters.
Here I’m using some free clipart for illustration purposes; please focus on the shading and not so much on the quality of the characters themselves!
All images are straight from Celulight with no post-production or cleanup — no other plug-ins were involved. The settings used to achieve the effects shown are more or less the default for the different modes with only minor tweaks where necessary.
So here we go! On the left we see the original cel or outline drawing and on the right what it looks like after applying Celulight:
The first image simply shows the normal map generated by Celulight from the outlines on the left.
Here we have a painterly rendering effect created by combining the Paint Texture and Bump Map features.
This is a smooth gradient effect like we often see on Feature Film posters — this type of effect is rarely used in animation because painting the gradients by hand is prohibitively expensive, whereas it’s just a simple click of a button with Celulight.
I hope these images help to illustrate Celulight’s capabilities — of course these are still images, but it works for animations just as well.
If you have any more test renders to add, please post them in the CGTalk thread!
For this Celulight update I made a lot of changes to the front-end GUI and only minor tweaks to the engine.
Changes in this version:
The latest Celulight Build was just uploaded and contains several fixes:
Download Celulight Installer
I won’t have that much time to work on my plug-ins this month as I am visiting my family in China.
Celulight is progressing well, so here comes another pretty large update!
Changes in build 293:
