Toonamation

Toonamation is a computer graphics company that was founded to help users make photos and videos look cool with little effort. We've developed unique, proprietary technology enabling users to give photos the visually striking looks of painted or inked panels in graphic novels and comic books. Similarly, Toonamation tech can "rototoon" video clips a... utomatically to look like hand-crafted, labor-intensive rotoscoped animations, as in the movie "A Scanner Darkly" and the animated Schwab commercials. As our video demos demonstrate, (here comes some tech talk) our video output is more temporally coherent and has fewer noise artifacts than that produced by conventional posterizing. In other words, figures better retain their shape and color as they move. Our approach doesn't use intensity or luminance-based bins for its segmentation, so the quality of our output remains high and doesn't degrade when processing dark images. This is not the case for other approaches intended to automatically generate toons from photos or videos. Besides our superior ability to naturalistically segment color, we've also developed a novel method of edge detection that provides cleaner, more usable, more aesthetically satisfying one-pass outlining from arbitrary photo input, such that the result simulates a line drawing, than that produced by current commercially available computer graphics applications or plugins. This means that users don't have to spend HOURS outlining figures or cleaning up dirty, splotchy output. Our edges are also temporally coherent and work well for video. Our effects are available for B2B licensing, and we are actively looking for partners to work with us in fielding online and offline applications. For online applications, such as use by photo-sharing and video-sharing sites (or for stand-alone photo-editing or video-editing), Toonamation tech supports automated image analysis for setting and tweeking parameters. This means that users can get aesthetically satisfying results from just a few, simple default ...Read More