What do Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, Hideaki Anno’s Rebuild of Evangelion movie series, and the latest season of Rooster Teeth’s RWBY have in common?
All of those productions, not to mention a lot of others, have used the 3ds Max plugin PSOFT Pencil+.
The non-photorealistic rendering plugin is designed to serve a specific purpose: making 3D cg animation look like traditional media, whether it’s a flat cel-shaded look or a textured pencil sketch style. In a film like Your Name, although the characters were drawn, there were around 180 shots that incorporated cg elements including vehicles and birds, for which Pencil+ was used.
