Forrest Brown

Step 1: The trick to making your animation's have a cartoon look is to render your animation twice. The first time you render it you need to give all of the objects a 100% Luminance value. You also have to go through and give every object a different color, this is what allows you to create the 2D cartoon effect.
Step 2: Render your animation a second time, this time setting the colors to what you want them to be in the final animation. In some animation programs you can create a 3 tone shading effect by adjusting the Shading Dropoff and the Specular Dropoff.
Step 3: Bring your two animation's into After Effects and place then in a new comp with the funky colored one on top. Apply the KPT 2 filter "Find Edges & Invert". If you don't have the KPT 2 filters there are other filters out that have a similar effect.
Step 4: Add the Color Balance (HLS) filter and adjust the saturation all the way down to change the lines to gray scale.
Step 5: Add the Levels filter and adjust it to change all the gray lines to black.
Step 6: The Final step is to switch the transfer controls for the top layer to Multiply.
Rendering with shadows on in step two gives a nice effect. Download a Quicktime movie of the Knight Running (320x240 560kb)

Any questions or comments e-mail to forrestbro@aol.com