I’ve been looking at NPR (non photorealistic rendering) techniques for a while now. The beautifully rendered “Paths of hate” is a really excellent example of the cell shaded style.

I came across an old Autodesk Presentation by the director Damian Nenow of Platige Image. He went through some of the techniques he used.

In the presentation Damian Nenow runs through how he created the clouds. It’s a neat trick using vertex colours to bake the light into the mesh, and much faster than volumetric rendering. When I get a chance I’ll create an in depth tutorial about it.

Paths of Hate won the SIGGRAPH Jury Award and a number of animation festival awards. I’m trying to track down a copy of the movie to buy. I’ll probably end up buying a SIGGRAPH 2011 dvd of some sort.