BCC Cartoon Look

Category: BCC Art Looks

Effect Name: BCC Cartoon Look

The BCC Cartoon Look filter, part of the BCC Art Looks category, is designed to emulate the look of rotoscoped animation, popularized by the film remake of “A Scanner Darkly” and also seen in broadcast TV advertisements for the Charles Schwab company.

Presets and Common Controls

BCC filters come with a library of factory installed presets plus the ability to create your own custom presets and preview them with the BCC FX Browser™.

BCC filters also include common controls that configure global effect preferences and other host-specific effect settings.

For more information about working with presets and other common controls, Click Here.

Effect Controls

Mocha Mask and Track

Continuum effects include integrated masking and matte tools that allow you to restrict the effect to specific regions of the image.

• Mocha masks: used to create custom spline masks. Mocha also includes Matte Assist ML and Matte Refine ML, which use machine learning to generate and track masks.
• Pixel Chooser: used to generate geometric shapes, gradients, or mattes based on channel, luma, or color-based selections. Additionally, an AI depth map generator, and an AI-powered face detection model allow for precise control of masks and mattes.

For more information, see Mocha and Pixel Chooser.

Compare Mode

The Compare Mode is used to view the filtered result alongside the original source layer. Several split-screen and side-by-side display options are available.

For more information, see Compare Mode.

• View: Allows you to view the final output or the output of some of the individual steps. Setting this to Line Mask can produce useful textured looks.
  • Output: Combines the posterized background and the generated lines.
  • Background: Displays only the posterized background image without additional lines.
  • Lines: Displays only the generated lines.
  • Cartoon Matte: Displays only the matte used by the filter for the image posterization.
• Temporal Smoothing: Controls smoothing of the filter result over time and can be set to affect the overall result or restricted to the posterize stage of the filter.
  • Off: Feature disabled.
  • On: Filter result is smoothed over time to help reduce jitter.
  • Lines Only: Temporal smoothing is applied only to the lines, ignoring the background.
  • Soften: Softens / smoothes the image before the lines are drawn.
• Cartoon On:Enables / disables the contoured cartoon effect.
• Cartoon Mix:Blends the contoured image result with the unfiltered image.
• Cartoon Levels:Sets the amount of contours in the filtered result. Lower values generate more of a cartoon look.
• Lines On:Enables rendering of lines generated from edges in the processed background image.
• Line Threshold:Sets the base threshold value for line generation. Increasing this tends to produce a cleaner looking result.
• Line Width:Sets the width of the lines.
• Line Soften:Sets the softness of the lines.

Advanced Group

This group of controls enables you to fine tune the result of the contouring and line generation.

• Boost Contrast:Boosts the contrast of the input image.
• Soften Max Deviation:Fine-tunes the master soften parameter. Higher values increase the amount of softening applied.
• Soften Iterations:Applies multiple passes of softening to the image.

Cartoon Group

This group includes additional controls for fine-tuning the image contouring.

• Soften Order: Determines whether the softening controls are applied before or after the image contouring pass.
  • Before Cartoon: Softens the image before it is posterized.
  • After Cartoon: Softens the image after it is posterized.
  • Both: Softens the image both before and after posterization.
• Background Only:When enabled, posterization is applied to the background image and does not affect line generation.
• Use Matte:Protects large solid areas of color from being affected by the contouring pass.
• Minimum Mix:Blends the contoured image result with the protected image result.
• Matte Threshold:Determines the pixel values included in the protection matte.
• Expand Matte:Spreads the matte outwards.
• Harden Matte:Hardens the matte edges.
• Softer Cartoon:Softens the image contouring.

Lines Group

This group includes additional controls for fine-tuning the generated lines.

• Detail:Sets the level of detail of the lines.
• Intensity:Increases the intensity of the edges when rendered into lines.
• Gamma:Increasing gamma makes the lines more prominent.
• Thicken:Makes the lines thicker.
• Blur:Applies a blur filter to the lines.
• Median:Applies a median filter to the lines.
• Contract/Expand:Contracts or expands the width of the lines.
• Invert Lines:Inverts the generated lines.
• Line Color:Sets the line color.
• Opacity:Sets the line opacity.
• Line Apply Mode:Sets the apply mode used for the lines.
• Line Apply Mix:Mixes the selected apply mode with a normal apply mode.
• Mix With Original: Blends the source and filtered images. Use this parameter to animate the effect from the unfiltered to the filtered image without adjusting other settings, or to reduce the effect of the filter by mixing it with the source image..