Cel shading technology in games and movies

First you need to talk about technology "cel shading". What it is? This is a kind of image conversion method. It lies in the fact that by getting rid of the midtones and identifying the boundaries of objects, we get a picture that resembles a drawing. Those who worked with vector editors know a very similar thing called “tracing”.

For the first time I saw the use of "cel shading" in the computer game "XIII". The game was created by Ubisoft in 2003. Here, ordinary and already familiar to us three-dimensional graphics are converted into live comics. Actually, this innovation game and became famous. No other merits were noticed.


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Meanwhile, director Richard Linklater used a similar technology in the film Awakening. The cinema was left unclaimed by the general public, but not because of its unusual appearance, but because of the complex philosophical conclusions on which the entire film is built.

Linklater's next work had a more impressive eight million budget. About 50 animators worked on the film. Despite the participation in the project of such stars as Robert Downey, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Keanu Reeves, the film failed at the box office. Rate only "clouding" will probably only lovers of literature Philip K. Dick, the book which made the film. Personally, I think that Linklater has succeeded. But the ideas of Dick themselves are frightening many people away and the closer to the original the movie is being shot, the more schizophrenic and paranoid it appears before the philistine.



For the film, a special frame processing program, Rotoshop, was written. For a minute of a film made in this way, it takes 500 hours of computer processing of the material. Therefore, to speed up the process, Rotoshop interpolates frames. Those. in fact, only every 10th frame can be entered into the machine; the program can draw all the intervals on its own.



The most impressive effect of the artists was achieved when creating the costume of a policeman working undercover. This is a kind of mosaic shell, consisting of images of more than a thousand (!) People. 18 animators worked on the creation of this image.



The next film, about which I want to tell, was released later on “Cloudings”, but the work on it began back in 1999. The Renaissance looks very impressive. This is a completely black and white film. The fantastic story told by French filmmakers was also not commercially successful. At a cost of $ 18 million, the film did not collect less than two million at the box office.



In this case, a slightly different technology was used. For shooting, as far as I understood, they involved not just the processing of a contrasting picture, which on the screen turns into a striking animation, but a multitude of sensors that informed the computer not only the position of the characters in space, but even their emotions. For example, the actors wore special glasses that fixed the movement of the eyes, the size of the pupils or the quivering of the eyelashes.



Work on the film took a total of 6 years. The complexity of the task, which the creators of the picture set themselves, scared all the producers. In the role of savior was the company IBM. The blue giant provided not only computer equipment, but software.



Immediately I will say that I deliberately do not mention Robert Rodriguez’s film “City of Sins”, which is very similar in its visual to Renaissance. I think that this movie is well known to all Habra readers even without my humble article.

In conclusion, several links:

The site of the game "XII"

The site of the film "Clouding"

The site of the film "Renaissance"