Prerelease Acrylic Effect
We’ve developed a new effect called soft-borders that resembles a flat acrylic painting. Color regions are sometimes smoothly blended, sometimes provided strong transitions, for a painterly look that combines tight brushwork with loose washes. Soft-Borders renders faster than our well-know Rototoon (flat-shaded) effect. We’re currently working on CUDA-based speedup of all our effects, to be extended next year to OpenCL support for all GPU cards, and after GPU porting there’s a good chance that Soft-Borders will render in real-time or near real-time.
Here’s a demo clip applying Soft-Borders to a woman running in a field at twilight. It looks like it was lifted directly from a horror or suspense cartoon. You’ll have to add the zombies or evil mutants yourself, and the possible uses are limited only by your imagination. This look has great temporal coherence and darks are deftly handled and maintained without coalescing into pulsing blobs typical of posterize-based cartooning. We expect this to be a welcome addition to your toolbox in future ToonIts, and we’re also making it available for separate and standalone applications. Contact me through twitter DM or on LinkedIn if interested.
By the way, the royalty-free pre-transformed video clip was from iStockVideo, and royalty-free music track, Chase Pulse, was by Kevin MacLeod.
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