I messed around with adding ambient occlusion to an animation.

It was an interesting challenge due to how easy it is to make soft shading look bad in animation and how hard it is to track it around.

the bigger chunks of shading such as cast shadow i took care of with cel shading. Ambient occlusion is the idea of how something looks under ambient lighting. Basically, it's about adding little shadows to all the little creases and dips to add to the realism.

I took all this one step forward and added general highlights with soft shade.

this whole process was a bit of a pain in the neck due to the fact I was using an unconventional program for this process (verve painter) which can only support up to 20 layers at a time.

I really like how this turned out and I will attempt to do this kind of thing with bigger projects in the future.

With much love and appreciation

-Gabriel