This piece of CG is my humble tribute to the work of the Japanese mangaka Taiyou Matsumoto, author of “Tekkon Kinkurito/Black & White” and “Number 5”. A few years ago “Tekkon Kinkurito” inspired another great Japanese artist, Koji Morimoto, to create an amazing animated 3D short. Nothing about what I did can stand the comparison with their respective works, but I can’t help to share such inspirational sources.

What astounded me with the comics of Mr Matsumoto was his ability to draw almost anything with an over-distorted fish-eye effect. Of course, there are plenty of ways to render a CG fish-eye lens, using RenderMan, Mental Ray or FinalRender. But for some reasons I needed this scene to render with the scanline renderer of 3dsMax.




The Fish-Eye lens effect

The easiest way to distort a render is : put a distorted mirror in front of the camera. That’s what I did ! The camera was targeted to a simple chrome ball reflecting the scene. I just had to trigger the raytracer to get a nice and fully customisable fish-eye lens.

1. The toon rendering itself works quite the same way. For the cell-edge effect I needed something easy to tweak and fast to render, that’s why I used the “duplicated-geometry trick” : Duplicate your model, push the polygons along their normals, flip the normals, apply a black material, a noise modifier if required, it’s done !
2. It’s easy to setup and so fast to render that it displays in the OpenGL viewport.
3. For the cell-shading it’s rather simple too. You just need to set the contrast of each light to 100%, so that each surface will be rendered either light or dark without inbetween values. There’s nothing easier to setup imho, because you don’t need to deal with cell-shaders, the default Blinn material will do the job
4. The fish-eye and the toon-rendering effects works perfectly together, so that I could quickly render the scene (with a nice model was kindly given to me by Mr Masami Tanzi).