Question The Anime Toolbox

Hey everyone!
Came to know about the Anime Toolbox and related new packages (toonshader, visual compositor, material switch, that streaming images thing) and the MIKONOTE Sample, after I halted using my laptop since October.
It is really awesome cause I want to make anime shorts using Unity. The tools seem promising, but the internet currently lacks resources on them.
And, Is Anime Toolbox a package or just a set of (these) packages?


Just wanted to know if anyone here (if any official) can recommend a suitable workflow for using these tools, and especially about the visual compositor as it looks horrible in the MIKONOTE Sample. I really want to get started making Anime in Unity

Regards,
Harsh Narayan Jha

 

I have not used the Anime Toolbox, but play with animation in Unity. If you don't have any luck with it, there are other "toon" shaders like RealToon and Poiyomi, plus the Unity Sequences package can be used for stringing multiple Timelines together for a longer episode. But you have to work out a fair bit on your own...

 

Okay, wow! I had not looked at the Visual Compositor before. Complete with Stable Diffusion integration! It looks like a pretty powerful tool (which also usually means pretty complex). I cheat - I just use the game view and record animation that way. Much easier to start off.

It looks like the compositor allows you to create your final footage from a layered stack of assets, with different visual effects applied per object. The benefit of this over just recording the game view as I understand it is you can control lighting, color, and blur etc much better per layer. I find this hard to do via the Game view window - e.g. making the background darker I sometimes resort to black fog. Instead I think this would bring in the different parts of the final shot, with the ability to apply different effects to them. E.g. make the character in the foreground black as a silhouette. Great visual control if you have the artistic skills to leverage it.

So the Visual Compositor gives you all those controls inside Unity, but with a lot more complexity that goes along with it. The readme made the point it was set up by a professional compositor, someone who lives doing that work, so it was pretty advanced - not a basic example.

If you wanted an easier tool to learn from, you could look at Shoost for the composition steps. https://www.patreon.com/posts/62585593 - Use Unity for animating the character, then compose the layers (with effects) using Shoost. For me, I have stuck to just recording the Game view - so its more like recording a cutscene in a game, and living with the restrictions. But I am not doing cel shading - I fell in love with all the HDRP lighting effects which did not seem to fit well with cel shading.

I would love to hear how you go with it! Interesting stuff. (Sorry if you know all of the above - it was new to me that it was available!)

 

I had guess it’s functionality from the work compositor, but didn’t know all of that.

btw we met again @akent99 ! How are you doing with your web comics? I am very glad to say that The Cycle got selected in 3 festivals so far.

 

Thanks for the response!

First I want to say I am fully interested in the new Anime tools for Unity combined with the previously released Sequencer they would be much more powerful.

That’s great!

The MIKONOTE Sample is a rather big one, made by a real studio and the Graph is certainly made by a good artists. It is a good resource for learning, but not for getting started. Some smaller tutorials/projects/guides will do the job for beginners. I shall try the templates you linked.

what I wanted to know is a simple workflow in order to get my character and animations rendered into an anime episode. What can I think of (after having made an animation short with sequencer) is to get my characters and animations into Unity…. Arange them into timeline+sequencer…. And then what? What further functionalities will Anime Toolbox provide?

plus some tutorials on the Visual Compositor would do the job right!

All the best to the anime team at unity!

 

Wow! That is fantastic news! Congratulations! I have a tendency to tinker more than I should. Still trying to clean up my props and locations after upgrading to HDRP (most of the grasses disappeared and I did not notice until recently!). Also been playing with some of the speech synthesis work going on (https://extra-ordinary.tv/2023/03/02/emotional-speech-synthesis-for-animation-is-here/) and more recently exploring using AI for using screenplay text to create Timeline contents. Early days. I have seen a few projects doing similar work (e.g. building a location). Interesting stuff.

 

Thank you also for sharing all that information. I would also be interested to understand more about how it uses Timeline, and in particular is that use compatible with the Unity Sequences package, which would seem a logical combination. Do you have an alternative strategy? Or are they just not compatible? (I use the parts from the Sequences package I like - I don't use all of it.)

I saw "storyboard 0.71 preview" as well on the list of packages. I created an extended custom version of Storyboard that allowed me to put text over an image and then used that for speech bubbles. Another potential use for the AnimeToolbox is creating comics with static poses rather than videos with animation. I created a little library of speech bubble images (speaking, thinking, etc) with tails pointing in different directions then reused those images adding the text over the top of the image (the text inside the bubble) where the text was in the Timeline clip. It was much faster to use than creating a new image per speech bubble for me. So if you were taking feature requests for the Storyboard package, that would be mine - allow text as well as images. (My code is here if of any interest - quick and dirty, but it was useful for me.)

 

I am sure it could be done nicer. Here is a quick example of the result in case of interest.

 

Today I went through the articles on note.com (obviously translated them to English) and learnt a lot. All I wanted is to get a head start with the Visual Compositor and how to use it, so that I won’t wander into the black screen without the knowledge of any nodes. Now I know what each node does and the kind of “correct workflow” that should be employed.

I will soon post a step by step workflow of using the whole Toolbox on I get my hands on it and make something cool with it.

thanks very much!

 

Looking good!
Cant wait to try it out!