Celulight Technology Preview

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!