Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

I would love if the TV Paint team could create a system that would allow for animated lighting like that seen in Spa Studios 2019 feature Netflix film Klaus. Their set up for this allowed for the 2D animation to look very similar to 3d, while maintaining the charm and flexibility of 2d animation. With such a tool, I think that 2d animation would become significantly more demanded by clients and studios (which would be great for all the animators out there like myself who miss 2d!).

Thanks,
Garth Laidlaw from Canada

the lighting work on Klauss was made in post production software (like after effects).
and most important, it was not a tool or a plugin. it was a lot of hard work, a well done mix of tools and artistic decisions that give that result.

you dont need to ask for a "creative" tool. you are the creative tool.

You can achieve something similar if you translate 3D techniques into a 2D environment. I created this tutorial a few years ago for realtime toon rendering using maya viewport and AE
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ajsu-ad8o[/youtube]

In 2D you'd paint the same values as the RGB but representing different values for your Character, pretty much like Japanese Animation.

R would be your hard shadows, B your Highlights and G for casted shadows then you have your cel color on another layer.

You bring these three onto AE and using color selection tools you can get that soft shaded looks.

Also on klaus they did a process for illustration that involves an AO pass pretty much like 3D, this method has been popular among illustrators in the last few years so thats why Renee Chio was on board for the lighting.

Obviously the part where the Klaus tool called MOE shines a light on is on the inbetweening part of those passes, something that you could do if you work with vector based animation software and export those passes to be reworked on TVP or directly on AE.

We've been doing something similar for a few years except that our animation is all 3D with a 2D look "CG-アニメ"