Pre-Release Video Effects
I haven’t posted in a while, but in the meantime Seth and I have been busy. We’re in serious negotiation for an exciting new partnership to apply Toonamation effects in the mobile space - updates soon. We’ve also developed many new on-demand artistic looks, including several paint variations that improve the state of the art. These apply different algorithms than the rotopaint effect I demoed last September and work just as well to produce awesome videos as they do standalone images. The new effects are pre-release, meaning they’re not yet available through our plugin ToonIt! and may not be for several months. We’re offering them in the form of server-installable binary libraries for use at video-sharing, photo-sharing, and social networking sites, plus for other photo and video-related projects and applications. You can check them out below. Click the image for each effect to see it as a popup video demo. Note that each effect is individually adjustable, usually in multiple ways, but these demonstrate settings that we’ve found to work well overall.
Here’s the before clip used to produce the following demos. I found it at iStockVideo. BTW, I downsampled the frame rate in the clip to 12 fps before applying any of the effects. Several professional animators and animation instructors, along with Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy, suggested to me that this makes animated looks more convincing.
Here’s our rototoon effect. It’s not exactly new, but I’m including it as a point of comparison and because it’s cool to look at.
This first new effect is called Airbrush. It’s smooth and glossy with rich darks and has a machinima feel. It works well for horror/suspense content and many music videos.
This is our Smooth Paint effect. It generates individual frames that resemble intentionally realistic gouache paintings without visible brush strokes, similar to the artwork of Alex Ross in the graphic novel Kingdom Come.
This effect we call Rough Paint. It has more of an oil paint feel of raised brush strokes.
This is our new Paint Splotch effect. It’s looser and more expressionistic, somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh. Unlike other research paint effects described in the non-photorealistic rendering literature that have applied irregular color blobs to simulate a painterly appearance in standalone images, our effect also translates well to video.
This effect is called Woodcut. It’s a stark black and white look with thick outlines transitioning to deep shadows and has a strong graphic design feel, similar to Frank Miller’s artwork in the Sin City graphic novels. This effect can be recreated offline by ToonIt! through the proper combination of comic and shadow outlines.
Instead of white, new ToonIt! allows users to set outline background to any color. This is a cool and compelling variation in which background color is randomized and changes frame-to-frame.
The same color randomization applies equally well to foreground outline color for an especially trippy look. Yellow Submarine anyone?
Last but not least is Heat Vision. There are somewhat similar looks available on the web, but this version has been engineered for high temporal coherence. This means that output color distribution is relatively stable across frames and images, which makes the effect look significantly better in video and improves appearance overall.
Thanks for stopping by. If you like these, please let us know or pass the link along. We’re also always open to hearing suggestions for new effects.
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