Cartoon Style Rendering in Amapi

Amapi 3D v5 offers a bunch of new, exciting shades for cartoon style rendering. There are many ways to exploit this, from visual surface quality inspection in industril design, to pure and simple cartoon style rendering with half-shade shadows, and more.

Let's start with a coarse model of a heavy-duty sweater. I modeled this in Amapi (you might want to call it an armor-suit custom fit for Jeanne-d'Arc :-).

Using the Bezier smoothing tool (first on the left of five smoothing methods), I gave it a more organic look, then tweaked the wrinkles, etc...

Phong shaded

This model, when saved in ZAP format, is only 4.1 kbytes in size (!),
which makes it perfect for viewing over the web.
(for more on ZAP, check www.tgs.com/ZAP)

You can download the ZAP file by clicking the Right mouse button (or Click and Hold on Mac) to select 'Save Link As...' or the equivalent, depending on your browser, on this link: sweater.zap
Amapi v5 lets you re-import ZAP files (as long as there is no password lock on the ZAP file).

Amapi offers various image based and procedural shaders for rendering patterns over the model, and you can layer multiple textures into a complex shader, combining color textures with bump textures with transparency, reflection modulators etc... Here are just two examples resulting from this.

just one layer, wood grain
with some noise and
pink'ish colors

two texture layers, the first one
as shown to the left, plus a
second one affecting bump
mapping with a noise pattern,
creating a large 'trickot' effect
(coarse wool balls)

New Cartoon Styles - now with Shades!

Amapi also offers a selection of artistic (non-realistic) styles, such as clean cartoon and draft techno-sketch. This is the clean cartoon, with a simple fill color (blueish) and an edge color (white).

This however is new, in Amapi 5, i.e. you can add a few levels of shade to the cartoon style. This results in more traditional cartoon rendering.

This image to the right has 2 shades (light and dark) on the fill color.

This example has 4 shades. Note the close-up view for the detail on the 4 levels of shade. The transition can be subtle at times.

This next case is called 'saturated', i.e. all normal levels of shading are used.No specular highlights though.

This mode, called 'soft', is yet another variation.

Here's a fancy one, called 'Rainbow'. The effect varies with what the fill color is. In this example, the fill color is blue-ish. It shows as the top 'specular' highlights, e.g. on the arms and shoulders and around the neck.
In this example, the fill color is orange.

Back to Nature - the Zebra mode

Finally, there's a 'Zebra' mode, which mimics the environment reflection map from a grid pattern (or at least so it would seem).	This can be useful in determining the quality and continuity (or lack thereof) between curved surfaces.
(this is a negative of the original, with some contrast enhancement)	Even subtle changes in curvature can be identified, which otherwise might have gone unnoticed with simple Gouraud or Phong shading.

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