minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

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:

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.

2. Normap map

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

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.

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!