Artist's Comments
This is how I got the image done:
I started out with some concept drawings of how I wanted the
character to look. A coworker(throb) had pointed out that supercel
was merely giving a shade of the current color on the skin surface
when it should contain a different value. He helped me develop a
method for resolving this. Since supercel doesn't provide control
over color selection for the zone areas, I used a composite method.
I rendered out a color pass of the whole character. In this render
I made the hair and the skin a flat color(these where the 2 surfaces
that I thought needed the different values). I just set the paint
brightness to 1.0 in all zones for the skin and the hair to generate
a flat color. Then I rendered out 2 black and white passes, these
passes will be the shadow areas for the skin and hair, the white
areas being the shadow of just the skin and hair. In supercel I
turned the paint brightness of all the zones to 1.0 except zone
4 which I turned to 0.0, by doing this it will take everything
and turn it to black except the shadow areas which will be white.
I took the shadow pass and generated an alpha for that image based
on the red channel(you could use the green or blue channels as well,
or based on luminence). With that done I could adjust the color of
the shadow pass from white to whatever color pleases me and then
simply apply the shadow pass over the color pass. Also you will
note that the cel edge has varience in thickness. I used EdgeRGB,
a new plugin for polk(from Worley Laboritories), to generate the
line. Doing the compositing through this process makes it viable
to do for an animation.