you cannot only quickly adjust lighting with composite, there also is a new plugin interface that is waiting to be used!

i coded a Sumi plugin for the upcoming movie of Terrence Wessling.

the plugin essentially takes a toon render of any scene like this as input:

[attachmentid=20383]
(the guppy model was created by Terrence Wessling)

then you make some settings like so:

[attachmentid=20382]
(those are pretty complicated looking, but you can also start very simple)

and the plugin will (within a few seconds) give you something like this:

[attachmentid=20381]

great plugin! the only thing you're missing is a few ink splotches. ' ' )

-jon

Very nice!

This is my heart's desire!

I wants it.
I needs it.

Yikes - that's fabulous! Excellent! ooooo.... swoon

Hey Now... that looks quite 'natural media-ish'. We'll look forward to that-un!

Marcel, you are on quite a roll!

That looks realy cool Marcel!

Looks wonderful!

When's the upcoming movie coming up?

Amazing work, Marcel. I hope this plugin can someday be made available to the masses. Until then, please forgive my barrage of questions:

* Where is your plugin getting the brushstroke direction/pressure information from? Is it using a normal or depth buffer, or just improvising based on the 2D image?

* Are you able to use custom brush shapes instead of just a circle?

* Why is the Sumi image color-reversed from the toon original? (The red parts are black and the black parts are red...)

Hi All, Marcel has done a excelent job creating the shader for me, and if anyone needs a programer I'd recommend him in a heart beat.

Right now my project is in early development and I'm reluctant to talk too much about it. Artists, very superstitious people you know... LOL. Note: as of now the guppy is not in the cast and was developed fo testing only.

Any how it will start as a printed project an expand to a web/full animation, time frame is apx 1 year to release to the public. As things get finilized and milesstones met I'll share with the A:M members.

Unless you wish to share in my cost of the shader...

Marcel and I have a one year agreement, which by then the next version of A:M will be out and I'm sure Marcel will have added additional features to make it even better.

Some of the feaures:
The use of RGB & Bl filter to define 4 differnt strokes
Configurable Stroke direction
Stroke Fade
Brush Dryness
Min & Max stroke width

Reference material I gave Marcel, best sumi style animation I've seen yet. please note this example was done in traditional 2D and not with this plugin.
http://www.aantin.com/films/lepapillon.php

Beautiful animation there. Great story, the whole thing is a moving painting. Thanks for the link, can't wait to see how you are implementing Marcel's plug...

thanks Terry for filling in the blanks!
thanks to all for your comments!

imo the plugin has a lot of potential and with (a lot) more work it might one day become a full featured natural media rendering tool. a brush image would be very simple to implement, but i'm not convinced that it would create very good results. i'd rather like stroke images as with those you can really create ANY style you like, but this would be VERY difficult to implement (has been done before though).

the plugin is getting the direction information only from the lines it finds in the supplied toon render.
1. a thinning algorithm normalized the toon render
2. a vectorization algorithm creates a lot of "strokelets"
3. a renderer draws those strokelets

the drawing appears "inverted" because the color in the input only serves as a separation filter. you can decide later in what color you'll want your black/red/green/blue lines to be rendered.