May 20 2007

Celulight Beta 2

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Another week­end, another new ver­sion of Celu­light for pub­lic test­ing: I’ve fixed a num­ber of bugs and added some cool new fea­tures, including:

  • The nor­mal map gen­er­a­tor has been vastly improved and yields much smoother results with­out blur­ring out the details.
  • It’s pos­si­ble (and rec­om­mended) to spec­ify the line width — this way, Celu­light can also shade the out­lines so you can get rid of them in your ren­ders if you like.
  • The blue chan­nel (height) is cal­cu­lated. This allows the ren­der­ing of effects such as rim lights and embossed surfaces.
  • It is now pos­si­ble to select indi­vid­ual light sources.
  • The light’s col­ors are used for shading.
  • Sup­port for mul­ti­ple light sources has been implemented.

    • That’s the new fea­tures I can think of… I won’t list all bug fixes here for now.

    As always, you can grab the lat­est ver­sion of Celu­light here.

    May 13 2007

    PainterMan integrated into Celulight

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    I found a stu­pid lit­tle bug in this morning’s build of Celu­light, but it was a sim­ple fix.

    Nonethe­less, please down­load the lat­est ver­sion!

    PainterMan

    And here’s a lit­tle sur­prise for every­one: In a moment of inspi­ra­tion, I added my old Ren­der­Man shader Painter­man to Celu­light!

    Painter­Man is seam­lessly inte­grated into Celu­light. Sim­ply select a paint sam­ple tex­ture like the one on the left and Celu­light ren­ders your image in a non-​​photorealistic painterly style.
    All sorts of dif­fer­ent effects are think­able, as you can cre­ate new paint sam­ples your­self and even ani­mate them.

    For test­ing pur­poses, Celu­light comes with a few paint sam­ples. But there’s really no limit as to the style’s you can pro­duce; Pho­to­shop’s Artis­tic and Brush Stroke fil­ters are usu­ally a good start­ing point.

    May 13 2007

    Celulight Beta 1

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    See­ing as I’m get­ting way more requests from poten­tial Beta Testers than I had hoped for, I’ve decided to sim­ply make this an open beta.

  • Down­load Celu­light Beta 1

    • I’d be happy to get some feed­back on any bugs you find or improve­ments you’d like to see in the final ver­sion.
    If you achieve any inter­est­ing results, please post an image or two in my CGTalk thread — look­ing for­ward to what you can come up with!

    (Note that this is beta qual­ity soft­ware and as such should be con­sid­ered incom­plete, buggy and poten­tially harm­ful. Even if you should find it usable, red lines are ren­dered over every frame to pre­vent pro­duc­tion use for now.)

    May 11 2007

    Call for Celulight Beta Testers

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    The Celu­light pre­view has sparked quite some inter­est in the After Effects com­mu­nity. Peo­ple have writ­ten me with inter­est­ing projects and uses for the tech­nol­ogy, so it seems there is a need for a plug-​​in like this.

    I’m cur­rently prepar­ing a lit­tle beta test to find prob­lems and fix some remain­ing issues. For this I need — you guessed it — Beta Testers!

    Any­one inter­ested please con­tact me and men­tion your ver­sion of AE and your PC specs.

    May 4 2007

    Celulight

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    Celu­light is my tool designed to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate nor­mal maps from sim­ple out­lines or cel draw­ings. The result­ing nor­mal map can then be used by Nor­mal­ity to cre­ate real­is­tic or toon shad­ing effects.

    celulight_diagram

    Celu­light takes drawn out­lines or cels as source files to cre­ate clean, smooth nor­mal maps for shad­ing with my other tool, Nor­mal­ity.

    Features

    Tra­di­tion­ally paint­ing 2D cels by hand is a time-​​staking and labor inten­sive process and is there­fore rarely used in low-​​end car­toon pro­duc­tions. This omis­sion can result in a cheap and low-​​end look. Celu­light is capa­ble of automat­ing this process nearly 100%.

    In com­bi­na­tion with Nor­mal­ity, Celu­light cre­ates a really fresh look for car­toons and anime which might oth­er­wise be cost pro­hib­i­tive or even impos­si­ble to achieve.

    • Celu­light auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates nor­mals maps
    • Tem­po­ral smooth­ing avoids artifacts
    • Spa­tial smooth­ing pro­vides clean maps
    CelulightCelulightCelulightCelulightCelulight
    Pre­set Styles
    “Disney-​​style” toon shading Mod­ern 2.5D Toons
    Sparsely shaded anime style Stip­pled dots
    Soft-​​shaded “King­dom Hearts” Style Tex­ture mapping

    These and more styles can be achieved when Celu­light is used in com­bi­na­tion with Normality.

    Celu­light is cur­rently imple­mented as a stand-​​alone appli­ca­tion and as a plug-​​in for Adobe After Effects for Win­dows and Mac OS X.

    May 3 2007

    Celulight Technology Preview

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    Here’s a lit­tle some­thing I’ve been work­ing on for the past few weeks. If you’re pro­duc­ing tra­di­tional 2D ani­ma­tion or anime, this will inter­est you!

    These are early beta screen­shots, so things are bound to change.

    My lat­est devel­op­ment is loosely based on the tech­nol­ogy I came up with for my ear­lier After Effects’ plug-​​ins Nor­mal­ity and Real­ity. How­ever, while the afore­men­tioned plug-​​ins require a ren­dered nor­mal pass from a 3D appli­ca­tion to do their magic, this one sim­ply takes a 2D out­line draw­ing or car­toon cel as input.

    Celu­light’s pur­pose is to trans­form the inher­ently 2D nature of cel ani­ma­tion or comics into a world of pseudo 3D graph­ics. That’s where the algo­rithm from Nor­mal­ity comes into play, as Celu­light allows you to light your 2D cel draw­ing as if it were a real 3D ren­der! Since it’s based on Nor­mal­ity’s engine, you can use After Effects’ inter­nal light sources to adjust your light­ing. And to top it all off, it not only does dif­fuse shad­ing like a reg­u­lar 3D pro­gram, but can also do proper cel shad­ing as shown below.

    But the effect is much eas­ier illus­trated than explained in words:

    celulight_outlines

    1. Source Drawing

    Above is our source image. This is just a quick sketch of Tatsu from my Sleep­ing Dragon project — done in Pho­to­shop, so it’s 100% 2D.
    What’s impor­tant is that there are solid out­lines around objects; that’s what Celu­light uses inter­nally to cre­ate a nor­mal map.
    celulight_normals

    2. Normap map

    Celu­light auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates a nor­mal map that can be used by Celu­light directly or for advanced shad­ing with Nor­mal­ity.
    celulight_shading

    3. Dif­fuse Shading

    Run it through Celu­light and don’t for­get to add a light to your scene… voilà, instant shad­ing.
    In this case I’m show­ing just the dif­fuse com­po­nent for illus­tra­tion pur­poses.
    celulight_toon

    4. Cel shading

    Now for my favorite fea­ture: Cel shading!

    Gone are the days of flat 2D ani­ma­tion, Celu­light adds the shad­ows and high­lights for you auto­mat­i­cally. Con­trols are offered to set the indi­vid­ual col­ors as well as the posi­tion of the shadow.

    Advanced fil­ter­ing smooths out the result as to alle­vi­ate the “creep­ing” effect which can occur dur­ing cel shaded animation.

    Of course, play­ing with the var­i­ous blend modes gives you a plethora of inter­est­ing effects to choose from.

    To do

    So what’s left to do? Well for one, right now Celu­light only “bevels” out­ward. I’ll add a fea­ture based on the out­line color that lets you vary the bevel from “off” to “inward” and “out­ward”. Then the fil­ter­ing could be improved. Other than that, the plug-​​in is pretty much com­plete. See­ing as it works in real-​​time in SD res­o­lu­tion, there isn’t much opti­miza­tion left to do.

    Pub­lic Release

    When (and how) will Celu­light be released you ask? That’s some­thing I haven’t given much thought to so far. It really all depends on how much pub­lic inter­est there is in the tech­nol­ogy. 2D ani­ma­tion isn’t as big as it used to be, so I’m not too sure what the size of the mar­ket for a plug-​​in like this is.
    I’m also con­sid­er­ing free­ing Celu­light from the shack­les of After Effects by build­ing a stand-​​alone ver­sion — but that’s only if there’s a demand for it, as I’m per­fectly happy hav­ing it in AE.

    Please, if you’re inter­ested, let me know!

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