cartoon effect
SourceEffect01/ ORIGIN
Cel animation forced this look before anyone chose it. Each frame was ink outlined on the front of a transparent sheet and painted flat on the back, so a character could only ever be areas of solid colour bounded by a line, and shading meant adding another flat area rather than a gradient. Reusing cels across frames made flatness an economic necessity as well as a stylistic one. The convention outlasted the process by decades.
02/ SWEEP
LEVELS sweep
03/ SPEC
This effect quantises tone into a small number of flat bands and composites detected edges over them as dark outlines, which is posterisation and edge detection working together rather than either alone. LEVELS runs from 2 to 12 with a default of 5 and sets how many flat colour areas the image is reduced to, which is the control that decides between a hard graphic read and something closer to painted animation. EDGE THRESHOLD governs how readily a contour becomes a line, and EDGE WIDTH its weight. In kott it renders in natural colour so the flat areas carry the source hue.
it can move to the music
Every control of this effect can follow a track. Pick a signal in the studio’s audio panel (the beat, the downbeat, a build, the bass, or an EQ band you set yourself), point it at levels or any other control here, and set how far it moves. The sound comes from your microphone, a browser tab or a file you load, and it is analysed on your own machine.
how the audio routing works04/ FAQ
- What is a cartoon effect?
- A cartoon effect reduces an image to a few areas of flat colour and draws dark outlines along detected edges, reproducing how cel animation was inked and painted.
- What LEVELS value looks most like animation?
- Four to six. Traditional cel work used very few flat values per character, so low numbers read as animation while higher ones start looking like a photograph with outlines added.
- Why do the outlines look broken in places?
- Edges are detected from tonal change, so where two areas have similar brightness there is nothing to detect. Lower EDGE THRESHOLD to catch softer boundaries.
