A Procedural MatCap System for Cel-Shaded Japanese Animation Production

Abstract

MatCap is an expressive approach to shade 3D models and is promising for the production of typical Japanese-style cel-shaded animations. However, we experienced an asset management problem in our previous short film production; we needed to manually create many MatCap assets to achieve variations shot by shot or even frame by frame. In this work, we identify requirements for shading systems in Japanese animation production and describe our procedural MatCap system, which satisfies the requirements. Procedural MatCap generates customizable MatCap assets fully procedurally in run time, which drastically improves the asset manageability.