Celulight Technology Preview - Cel Shading in After Effects

[chandro]

im a newbie with AE but i think this plugin will be useful specially with some logos (besides cartoons) is there a way to flatten some areas if you dont wish to have emboss look?

btw this plugin promising!

[chandro]

double post

[Mylenium]

Here's a little plug-in for After Effects that I've been working on for a while. It's somewhat based on my Normality (http://www.minning.de/software/normality/) relighting suite, but rather than using pre-rendered normal maps, Celulight lets you shade and light directly from outline drawings or cels.

This can give a really fresh 3D look to cartoons or anime.

Celulight offers regular diffuse and specular shading as well as a new cel shader to simulate the characteristic multi-shade look of the more expensive 2D animation films.

Celulight is not ready for release quite yet, but I've prepared some samples and more information on my website: Celulight Technology Preview (http://www.minning.de/journal/toonami-tech-preview/)

I'd really like to hear if there's any demand for this plug-in. Is this something that would be interesting to the After Effects community?

Looking forward to hear your thoughts and comments!

The biggest problem for most people will still be creating the normal maps which is the ultimate limiting factor. Once that hurdle is overcome, people certainly will have lots of fun.

Mylenium

[klingspor]

Ah, but that's the cool part: Celulight creates the normal map itself from the outlines! All you need to feed it is an outline drawing or a flat shaded toon cel.

[klingspor]

By the way, if anybody has some nice outline drawings, comics or colored cels they'd like to see shaded, I'd love to try it out on them... I'm not a great draftsman, so my resource of graphics to test with is a bit limited ;)

[Mylenium]

Ah, but that's the cool part: Celulight creates the normal map itself from the outlines! All you need to feed it is an outline drawing or a flat shaded toon cel.

Ah, I see. That part was unclear to me. Then it's certainly going to be easy-peasy.

Mylenium

[Shinjipierre]

It looks great... I would love to try it ^^

[aforetaste]

Looks very interesting.
thanks for posting!

[dasomen]

Sounds really cool :) !

[payton]

well, sounds really interesting.

but how the hell do you get the information for the normal maps. just guessing? cause there is absolutely no information about depths in an outline drawing...

im curious,

payton

[klingspor]

but how the hell do you get the information for the normal maps. just guessing? cause there is absolutely no information about depths in an outline drawing...
You're right, the outlines don't inherently offer information about the surface normals, so obviously the technique is an approximation and naturally has its limits - for example, it cannot create accurate shading for flat or edgy surfaces.
However, if you look at cartoon characters, you'll see that they are generally very round and vaulty, which really facilitates the approximation of the normal map. Since cartoons aren't photorealistic anyway, in most cases we can easily get away with less than realistic shading.

So I suppose you could say Celulight does "educated guessing" when it comes to determining the normals - but you'd be surprised how well it works in most cases! :thumbsup:

Also, I added a function today that lets the user specify whether the contained surface is convex, concave or flat depending on the color of the outline - this creates many new possibilities in terms of shading.

Cheers!

[chandro]

count me in! want to try it!:thumbsup:

[klingspor]

Well, as there appears to be more interest than I had anticipated, I'm preparing a version of Celulight for beta testers.

Anyone interested please contact me through my website, this will make communication easier along the line.
Please mention your version of AE and your PC specs. Oh... and sorry, Windows only for now!!

The beta should be ready by early next week.

[zglows]

this seems really cool

[klingspor]

I was expecting only a handful of candidates to beta test Celulight, but ended up with more potential testers than I could possibly ever need. As I don't want to start some kind of popularity contest here, I won't be excluding anybody and have decided to simply make this an open beta.

Please go ahead and download the Celulight Beta from http://www.minning.de/journal/celulight-beta/

Nonetheless, I'm still counting on your feedback ;)

So if you happen to come across a bug or manage to produce something interesting with the plug-in, please let me know and perhaps post an image in this thread!

[klingspor]

Some hints on the usage of Celulight:

First of all, remember to create a light source in After Effects - without that, it won't work at all. For now leave it at its default position, you can move it around later.

Note that this is an early Beta version and there are red lines rendered over the frame - sorry, no production use for now!

Now that that's out of the way... import your outline layer and apply the Celulight plug-in. This can be a simple line-art drawing or even an already colored cel. As long as there's a reasonable amount of contrast between the fill and the contour, Celulight can handle it.
Also note that it works best if the layer has a transparent background. However, the artwork itself should have a fill color, even if it's only white.

Immediately, you should see some rough shading. Play with the Threshold to adjust the areas that get shaded. To smooth the shading, adjust the Filter parameter to your liking. The higher the filter value, the smoother your shading becomes... at the expense of longer render times. I've had good results with the Medium and High settings.

It may help to disable the Shading Engine at this point while you adjust the normal map. The normal map is created internally by Celulight to approximate the height of the surface - no, it's not perfect and there may be cases where it simply doesn't look right... but for Cel shading on cartoon characters I've had excellent results so far.

If your outline has colors besides black, enable the Colored Outlines switch - this allows you to control the shade and shape in specific areas, e.g. you can set them to be convex, concave or simply flat. (I'm currently adding controls to simply ignore a specific color.)

To control the shading, there are a bunch of parameters that are probably self explanatory; if not, play around with them to see what they do.
Then there's the Toon Engine: Switching this on changes the shading from the standard diffuse to a cel shaded look. Use the Toon Threshold to control the shadowing. If you have Gloss enabled, you can add a third color to the base and shadow.

The Gradient parameter is a bit experimental but gives a very modern cartoon look similar to the game Kingdom Hearts. I like it! :)
Another experimental feature is the Bump/Normal mapping. Not quite sure why you'd want to use this, but perhaps it can help with a sort of paper cut out or less than pristine cartoon look. Play with it - you'll see what I mean. :shrug:

Well, that pretty much sums it up and should get you started with Celulight. I'll post a more detailed tutorial on my website in the coming days.

If you have any questions please post them here; that way, other users may have their questions answered as well.

Have fun and cheers!

[klingspor]

Aaaaand another update: I've integrated my old PainterMan RenderMan shaders into Celulight.

This means that it now allows for truly painterly shading... try it, it's really cool!

[bimdas]

the setup file doesnt install anything for me. Tried installing it to an empty folder and it doesnt add anything to it..

[klingspor]

the setup file doesnt install anything for me. Tried installing it to an empty folder and it doesnt add anything to it..Thanks for pointing that out :)

I got rid of the setup routine for now. Try downloading the file again and just copy the plug-in .aex from the .zip file to your AE plug-ins directory.

[Shinjipierre]

mmm, I get :
1 ) plug-in could not be loaded
2 ) an "invalid filter" error ( 25 :: 3) << if that means something to you....

[klingspor]

That's a tough one... perhaps you have to download the newest C++ runtimes from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32bc1bee-a3f9-4c13-9c99-220b62a191ee&displaylang=en

Let me know if that fixes it!

[klingspor]

Actually Shinjipierre, I just checked your PC specs from the mail you sent me: Your processor doesn't support SSE2 instructions I believe.

I recompiled the plugin so that it should work for you know - try downloading it again!

[Shinjipierre]

mm, I tried with the recompiled plug-in and installing the C++ runtimes but I still get the same error.

[klingspor]

Ok, I switched all compiler settings to the ones from my older Normality plug-ins... not sure what's going on here as it works fine on my machine.

It would be great if you could try again with the latest download.

[explorer-pl]

i get an error "could not be loaded (126) (48 :: 46) "
i've send you my specs few minutes ago.

[klingspor]

explorer-pl, please download the latest version from my site - I'm pretty sure the problem you're seeing should be fixed.

[Shinjipierre]

Ok, it finally works, thanks... I've seen some bugs, I'll report them in another post. (well, the big ones first


Too bad... it's really slow on my computer, but, well... my processor is really old, I need to change my computer.


Anyway, here's my first glance... yeah, I could have done a rendering in cellshading, ok, I just wanted to try the plug (without having to draw first ;) ) and see how accurate it was.

http://ks35578.kimsufi.com/~shinji/osef/Cellshaded.mov (http://ks35578.kimsufi.com/%7Eshinji/osef/Cellshaded.mov)

[Shinjipierre]

Ok, "big bug" reports :

1 ) It doesn't work anymore when I'm precomping the effect - says that it can't find the light emitter.

2 ) I don't really know why, but sometimes, when I change the settings, it doesn't render the whole thing (but that may be a bug from my crappy computer).

3 ) It may be coming from bug 2 but... sometimes, I get a half normal map/half shaded map rendering.

[Firas]

wow .. its a dream to have something like this inside after effects.. am looking forword to test it in real production .. maybe with support of HDRI environment :)

[Shinjipierre]

Hi, I made another tests with the plug

I found out about the two random bugs, it's just when I use the sliders instead of typing something, it doesn't want to render, it's probably because of my comp.

I tried it with my comp at work as well... It's actually fast and neat with it :)


k, here's the other test I did, using an old illustration I did.

http://ks35578.kimsufi.com/%7Eshinji/osef/celulight/total.jpg

[Shinjipierre]

Other feedbacks :

1 ) It would be nice to have an "invert" for the outline mask (I had white outlines and black background picture first)

2 ) A section for the Shading parts would be nice as well

3 ) The shadows are a bit aliased when i look at it closely (even with the smooth parameter at high), an anti-aliasing would be nice.

[AndrewE]

Hey man, this LOOKS AMAZING!

Hands down, if you're up for full on production testing please e-mail me at:

aembury@fatkat.ca

I'm a creative producer and post supervisor at Canada's fastest growing animation company.

Check us out:

www.fatkat.ca

Let me know again if you're willing to go all out in production tests! As of right now we will be working on 3 full time 2D animation productions. I'm going to download the beta and start putting it through the tests'. But I would like to work with you on this.

Thank you for your time and effort in developing such a cool plug-in!

[klingspor]

@Shinjipierre: Thanks for your testing and detailed error report.
- I'm aware of the re-render issue and still trying to get that sorted out.
- Pre-comping might be an issue - I'll have to check how other plug-ins that use lights in non-standard ways handle this.
- I probably won't add a feature to work with inverted lines because then what happens with the colored line mode... will Red/Blue/Green also be inverted? Too complicated in my opinion... anyway, it's simple enough to invert the line-art with After Effects filters.
- I'll also fix the aliasing, that should be pretty simple but I just want to get all the base functions done first.

@AndrewE: Your offer sounds interesting! Please contact me directly through my website so we can work something out!

[Shinjipierre]

Here I am again.

I did another video using your plug-in.

http://ks35578.kimsufi.com/%7Eshinji/osef/celulight/image.jpg (http://ks35578.kimsufi.com/%7Eshinji/osef/Personnage%202d_xvid_v3.avi)
(xvid codecs)

For me, it seems to work properly, I've played with most of the options... I've barely used the bump/gradient options, though.

I would just say something about the light...
1 ) We can't put more than one light (i wanted to make a car pass next to the character as he was walking). Well, it would probably be possible if we could precomp it and use fusion modes.

2 ) One can't choose the light they want to use either. I had 2 lights on my composition (one for celulight and one for the background) at the beginning. I had to precompose the background.

3 ) Maybe a simple workaround would be not to use the "lights" but a simple 3d coordonates point in the plug-in.

[klingspor]

Hi Shinjipierre,

I added the feature you requested for selecting individual light sources - simply select the light(s) you want to use in the plug-in's drop-down menu.
Celulight now also works properly with more than one light source and respects the light's color settings.

You should be getting much cleaner results from the refined normal map generator. The filtering in particular has been improved. You should now specify the outline's width so that it gets shaded as well.

The blue channel (height) is calculated properly now, so it's possibly to create effects like rim lighting or embossed surfaces.

Grab the latest version from http://www.minning.de/assets/download/celulight_beta.zip

Cheers!

[AndrewE]

Hey man!

I just wanted to let you know that I e-mailed you via your site and I was just wondering if you have had received it or not.

Thanks!

Have a great day!

[monovich]

Been playing with the beta and it seems pretty cool, but needs some work.

1. Precomping still doesn't work well for me. At least I think it's precomping. When render the item, it switches to "normals" mode, not cell shaded mode.
2. It only refreshes half the time, often leaving the lower half black. If I purge the cache and re-render, it'll usually get it right after a few tries.
3. It's not super intuitive. I guess that's subjective, though. What are "confidence" "outline map"
4. The texture mode doesn't look like I'd expect it to. I've used Worley's G2 in the past so maybe I'm used to that. http://worley.com/E/Products/g2/art.html

Anyway, here's a test I did. I rendered out flat color from Lightwave, then used After Effects filters to generate my outlines, then added cellulite shadows as a pass to get the final look.

Its got a lot of promise! I really like the plugin, and would definitely use it if my project calls for it. I'm doing a 3d cell shaded project right now, and it'd come in handy if it were less buggy and didn't have any cross hatch overlays. If you have any updates, I'd love to try those out.

here's my experiment:

original

http://www.mono-motion.com/cpu_raw.jpg

processed

http://www.mono-motion.com/cell_test.gif

[hospadam]

What are your feelings on a mac version of this plugin? I'd love to try it, just don't have a PC.

Either way, looks great :)

[klingspor]

Thanks for your input monovich! I'll look into fixing the problems you found once I have a little time to work on the plug-in. As for it not being intuitive right now, I hope to solve that with a manual and/or tutorial. AE doesn't really offer a way of making parameter items more descriptive.
The texture mode isn't intended to work the way textures normally do - actually it cannot, because the normals don't contain UV data. It's just a port of an old non-photorealistic RenderMan shader I programmed a while ago. The plug-in comes with two maps you can use as examples to see how it works.

@hospadam: I'd say a Mac version is pretty much out of the question for the time being. I owned an Intel Mac until very recently but found it all but useless for graphics work. Now that native Photoshop and AE are being released I suppose that's a moot point, but I already sold my Mac and don't intend to buy one again even though I loved the machine itself... to cut a long story short: I have no means of porting to AE for OSX even if I wanted to.

[klingspor]

Ok, I've just uploaded a new version with some fixes:
- monovich and shinjipierre: Pre-comping should work now. I didn't have enough time to test it properly, but I'm confident that I resolved the issue. Remember that the pre-comp must include a light source as it does not check for them in the parent comp!
- The number of parameters has been stripped down a bit and assorted more logically (I hope!)
- The installer program is back and should now install to the correct directory.

You'll find the latest version at minning.de (http://www.minning.de).

[klingspor]

There's a new build of Celulight available for download at my website.

I've addressed many issues that were brought up in this thread and from users writing to me. The somewhat cluttered interface has been trimmed down without sacrificing control and features: It should be much more intuitive now that only actually usable controls are made available in the specific modes - for example when tweaking normal maps, the controls for shading and lighting are hidden.
The problem with half-rendered frames should also be a thing of the past.

Let me know if there's any more problems!

[monovich]

cool! I'll try it out.

One other thing I noticed was that the cell shading was very ailiased. Is there a way to anti-alias it?

[klingspor]

One other thing I noticed was that the cell shading was very ailiased. Is there a way to anti-alias it?That's one of the things I'll fix towards the end of the development cycle as it's fairly simple to implement. For now, you can turn on "Filter Shading" in the Shading section.

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.

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 can see the original cel or outline drawing and on the right what it looks like after applying Celulight:

http://minning.de/images/content/test1.jpg
The first image simply shows the normal map generated from the outlines on the left.

http://minning.de/images/content/test2.jpg
Here we have a painterly rendering effect created by combining the Paint Texture and Bump Map features.

http://minning.de/images/content/test3.jpg
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.

http://minning.de/images/content/test4.jpg
A simple two-tone toon cel shader effect.

http://minning.de/images/content/test5.jpg
And finally a setup with multiple colored lights - this was really easy to setup because all it takes is intuitively moving around lights in After Effects while you see your changes in real-time.

I hope these images help to illustrate Celulight's capabilities - if you have any more to add, please post them!

[AndrewE]

Hey Stefan!

I sent you another e-mail last week about furthering cellulight in a 2d production environment. If there is anyway that you would be able to get ahold of me that would be perfect.

As of right now I'm very very confused! I generated a normal map, but then my shading was very buggy and I honestly, do not really understand the process. Is there any way that you would be able to create a tutorial on to to get simple two tone shading?

[klingspor]

Today I came up with another plug-in for After Effects. This one is much simpler than Celulight and hence was pretty quick to implement.

Floodgate can be considered an advanced paint bucket or fill tool.
Where the aforementioned tools only fill a single area with one color at a time, Floodgate floods up to 64 distinct areas with up to 8 different colors.

Floodgate is squarely aimed at coloring in toon and cel animation and outlines drawings, which is a real pain to do in After Effects without it.

It lets you fill separate areas with a single color, which is often a requirement when coloring outlines - for example areas that are broken up by another area of a different color. Floodgate currently offers up to 8 colors, but of of course you can stack several instances of the plug-in to use as many colors as you need.

I've uploaded a beta version of Floodgate here (http://www.minning.de/assets/download/floodgate/setup.exe).
Please go ahead and try it out! I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this one as well.

[chris_b]

Wow.... just found this thread and played around with Cellulite for a couple hours. It works beautifully. Any idea when this will be available for commercial use?

[klingspor]

Any idea when this will be available for commercial use?Originally I was intending to release Celulight for free like my other plug-ins, but the thing is that I've put so much work into it that releasing it for free just wouldn't make sense.
In the meantime my personal situation has also changed: I recently started my own little animation studio and my partners and I believe that having Celulight under our belt will help us stand out and of course improve our workflow - a huge advantage for our business, obviously.

Anyway, we are again contemplating licensing the software because I've gotten a number of requests lately.
However, my past experience with selling plug-ins tells me it's not worth it after you factor in the time and cost of setting up proper distribution channels as well as dealing with administrative tasks and user support inquiries.

I'll keep you updated...

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