Moho Forum

Hey folks, just came across this little thing about Inkscape that may be useful to you as you work in Anime Studio, or for that matter, any package that produces 2D animation.

The surprising thing (to me) is that Inkscape doesn't just do SVG vectors. Like Anime Studio, it also has some unique filters which can be applied to bitmaps. The "Morphology" and "Shadows and Glows" filters are likely to be the most relevant to your needs.

http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... reset.html

But there is something extra-special, I think, about the Diffuse Light filter in the "ABC" section. It's of a class recommended as "best" for "normal objects" (vectors), but in reality, it has no problem lending a world-class 2.5-D look to a flat character, as shown below.

For the record, this flat character was rendered directly out of iClone, with no other postwork, except that I changed the color curves to improve the gamma. Tne irony is that Inkscape brought half a dimension back to the flattened 3D character.

I assume that Mike could port this open-source filter into Anime Studio for native use...

You can even make the effect MORE impressive by adding a drop shadow.

UPDATE the update:

I have some good news for using this effect on animation.

The Diffuse Light filter is apparently a web standard filter; you can get the same effect inside Firefox!

I am pretty confident I can program Firefox to load a PNG sequence into an SVG file containing the filter and call http://screenshot-program.com/fireshot/api_demo.php to write out each image.

Want to know more?

Introducing the height map http://fedev.blogspot.com/.

AND you can change the azimuth and elevation in the SVG code to get varied lighting simulations--front, behind, left, right.

You say you want to do cel animation? You owe it to yourself to look into this!

Particularly since you can program Firefox to batch load a bitmap sequence and you can probably write them out using Fireshot.

Here's a handy-dandy cheatsheat: http://generalpicture.com/svgdiffuselight.svg

Note that (as usual) Opera significantly outstrips Firefox in SVG support. Sometimes when you apply multiple lighting filters to SVG objects, Firefox's ability to render completely shuts down. Opera more reliably shows the combined effects you can create in Inkscape.

I haven't purchased and investigated After Effects yet, but it will be interesting to see how many of SVG's lighting effects are achievable with After Effects lighting.