Celulight is an extension of Normality and part of our proprietary toon shading technology.
This technique is applied to either 2D cel drawings or to especially prepared 3D renders and can be used to achieve a variety of non-photorealistic effects, including

• Classic toon shading
• Modern 2.5D Toons
• "Kingdom Hearts" Style
• Painterly renderings

Even though we're primarily a 3D graphics studio, Celulight allows us to create our animation in high-end 3D graphics programs and still achieve the classic 2D animated look. Celulight's approach is fundamentally different from regular toon shaders, in that it functions in 2D and not 3D-space, thereby working with the same material that traditional animators have. The results are very close to hand shaded cels.

PainterMan Integration

Celulight integrates a stripped down version of our PainterMan shaders originally developed for the RenderMan 3D renderer. Select a paint sample texture like the one on the left allows Celulight to render in any painterly style you could imagine. All sorts of different effects are thinkable, as we can create new paint samples quickly and easily, and even animate them.

Some examples of Celulight on our characters

Use in production

We're currently using Celulight on the production of our short film A Night at the Cathedral and are adding new features as needed. Most notably, all character models are lit in Celulight to convey a traditionally animated look.