More Non-photorealisitic Renders (NPR II)
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I'm getting some weird issues. Everytime I try to apply the prtoon shaders, surfaces are disappearing.
I think I have the opacity problem fixed, Here is my 1st try with @Crescent's free pwToon shader presets. Not happy with it. I need to expirement some more I guess, Ignore the jacked up pose. I know it's messed up.
Batman Beyond.
Wow - Batman looks spectacular, tkdrobert, well done.
Thanks
This has a VERY nice look to it. A nice, simple and clean character study. You've definitely achieved more with these tools than I have.
Thank you @mmitchell_houston that's so kind of you. I'm so in awe of all the great renders on this thread. I've been following along for ages.
tkdrobert asked me on the pwToon thread how I mixed work with pwToon and Visual Shaders. I popped some details down but said I'd do something to show how I used shaders together. This is an unfinished piece. I have absolutely no idea about the detail behind lighting in 3Delight and the render settings. I use a set of lights offered for free on Deviantart and a scripted render setting from this forum. You'll see that I haven't got the lighting right on the main figure in the picture below. Normally I'd add some red reflected lighting to the figure in postwork, but this is a straight render with no postwork at all except for adding my signature.
Picture 1: This is what you see in the viewport. Just the figure holding a gun.
Picture 2: This is what renders. I have a plane behind figure with shadows and reflection enabled with pwToon. I couldn't work out how to make the plane a solid colour and still retain the shadow/reflection so so I added a second plane with a metal shader. I haven't got it lined up right and you can just make out a second reflection.
I used Visual Shaders on the hair and then appled PW Toon, tweaking the colour settings and the lines. Her skin is Visual Shader with the line option colours made darker. Her eyes are a mixture of pwToon (Irises) and Visual Shaders. The dress is pwToon but with the image maps retained and thicker lines applied. The Bot reflected in the wall is simply the 3Delight version out of the line of the camera.
I've spent hours on this today, tweaking and redoing sections when they went wrong, but I've learned a lot in the process. This is a just a test piece really and I probably won't take it any further but it has been fun to work with. It's given me lots of ideas for future images if I can ever get a grasp on how to use 3delight!
I'm still a little confused. You used VSS on the skin. Did you change any of the VSS numbers in the Surface tab? What pwToon presets are you using? I've been having trouble with any preset except Cresent's free shaders.
A toon version of Batman Beyond. I used VSS on Batman and pwToon on background. I also used the free Manga Stle Shader outline geoshell script on Batman. Lots of postwork in PS and TS. I feel like I'm chasing the dragon trying to find a style I can stick with 100% of the time.
Both LineRender9000 and Sketchy are on sale today. Any recoomendations?
This definitely is very close to the end result that I want, but I wonder if it might improve with a little traditional inking. I have been using Sketchy Toon Shaders in some cases for the backgrounds but I have started doing the figure renders separately and combining them later on. I like having that greater control in the look development because I can light the environment how I want and the added effects don't affect the figures because they are rendered separately. I can experiment with different lighting effects with fewer unexpected results.
@tkdrobert here are the screen shots.
Visual Style Shaders
1. There are a number of skin settings to choose from. For the image above, I selected the skin surfaces (not the eyes, mouth and teeth - I did those individually and mostly with pwToon) and used Visual Shade Pink. I adjusted the lips tint to one a little darker.
2. On this image after I changed the skin using VSS, I changed the outline colour settings in the surface tab to something darker.
pwToon
3. I basically select the item I want to change e.g. the hair and apply the base shader which sets up the surface tab with the proper settings for pwToon shaders. I very rarely use a preset from the resources section and if I do, it's usually the architectual one or the cartoon classic. Usually I select each individual surface e.g. the iris or the pupil etc. and use one of Crescents shaders. I choose my shadows, line thickness etc. from what is in the set.
4. If things are not quite how I want them, I then go to the surfaces tab and play around with the numbers and colours. For instance I might turn off the internal line and not the outline. Or might change the colour / line colours to something closer to what I want. I don't really go for the one click option.
To be honest, I make a huge number of mistakes but I learn a lot from them
I'm very good with VSS. I've had it for a while. I just was curious if you actually changed the shading or outline numbers in the surface tab. I've been experimenting with these numbers for a long time now. I have settings that I think work very well for Western style comics, but I'm still trying to get a setting for anime that I'm 100% happy with.
I played around some more with pwToon last night and I think I'm getting a better handle on it. At a minumium, I think it will be a good tool to use on backgrounds. Right now, I still perfer VSS for figures. I'll keep expiremnting, but learning from others can save a lot of time.
I haven't even started on pwCatch yet.
I think I need to learn from you
, lol. I'm definatetly a starter with all this!
I'm happy to anwser any question you have. For a newbie, you are doing very well.
HIGHLY recommend LineRender9000. It's what i've been using in all of my recent toon renders.
[Click here for gallery page]
[Click here for gallery page]
If you do get it, I have a quick piece of advice: use Shader Mixer to make a "normals" camera.
You see, LR9000 comes with some special cameras that can be used to help generate better toon outlines. One of these is the "edge blend" camera, which you can see on pages 13 and 14 of the documentation: http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/34653/34653_linerender-9000-user-guide.pdf
In my opinion, it's the best of the included cameras to use when using the LineRenderer. However, one of the first things I did when I got LR9000 was that I quickly cobbled together an extra camera in Shader Mixer that rendered out normals (iirc, all I did was load the existing edge blend camera into shader mixer and replace the edge blend node with one of the normal based nodes, though I can't remember which). I then do two outline passes, one edge blend based and one normals based, and then combine them together. I tend to get far more detailed outlines that way, and I tend to only need minor postwork to get rid of some unnessecary lines.
All of my early LR9000 renders (such as the shirtless man i've attached down there) were done using the included "edge blend" camera and my cobbled together "normals" camera, but in my more recent ones (such as those Sakura 8 ones up there) i've been experimenting with surface shaders that give me a little more control over the outlines I get.
For me, LineRenderer 9000 is definitely a game-changer.
I like the overall look of the figure, especially the geoshell outline. That's the one thing I really miss from Daz Studio (as opposed to Poser): The ability to get a good outline on my geometry. The DS outlines are just okay, as far as I have seen. By that, I mean that they aren't really strong enough for production work because they don't seem to offer enough variation within the scene. Whereas in Poser, I can set different thicknesses based on material types.
Neverthless, you guys are ge amazing results from these shaders and effects. If you guys ever get it nailed down, I might coem back to DS for certain projects/effects.
I agree: LineRender9000 is a fantastic product (I was a beta tester for it, btw). I really like your mash-up that created the outline on this figure. Very close to being something I could use for my comic art.
BTW: Even though I'm not commenting on each of your posts, I am reading them all and absorbing the knowledge you're sharing with us Thank you very much!
Your images look fantastic. I'm not sure I follow you on creting the "Normal" camera, but I'm willing to try anything. I'm defiantly getting LineRender at this point. Now the only question is if I will get Sketchy too. When I add both to the cart, I get a bigger discount on both. So either $11 for 1 or $18 for for both.
By "normal camera", what I mean is a camera that renders only the normals of a mesh. This is usually referred to as a "normal pass" in other software. If you do a google image search for "normal pass", you'll see what I mean.
I've never used "shader mixer" before, but I'm sure I can figure it out. Do you parent these cameras together so they are all pointing the same way?
And I for got to ask. What surface shaders did you use on your anime renders?
For the shirtless muscle dude, that's just pwToon and the LR9000 cameras.
For the two anime renders, those are using some custom toon shaders that i've been slowly developing for the past few years.
Ah ok. I'll try Visual Style Shaders with LineRender and see how that goes.
BTW, I can't find the model you used for the musle man in my wish list nor the DAZ store. The expressions and her poses are still there, but not the Anmimated man for GM2. Weird.
Did some more work on my pages. Added gray to the dragon head, more blood and more coins.
How's it look so far?
The blood is a lot more noticable this time.
I can't get LinRender9000 to work. I'm too tired to figure out what I'm doing wrong and I'm out of time. I'm trying to use the Edge Blend camera, but I'm getting no lines when I render. Tried playing with line width and threashold but nothing. UGH!
Make sure you have the Edge Blend character selected in the viewport. They're seperate cameras, so you need to switch between them like you would do if you were trying to render something from multiple camera angles. Also, keep the width and threshold at their defaults for now, as that should be enough to get something noticeable.
Agreed, blood is much more recognizable now, looks good and looks like a battle took place. Very nice!
Thanks guys! I put a LOT more work into the coins and the head, but I think it paid off. I need to add a background, and possible a tone under the coins (to make the floor gray). But that may have to wait a few days. I think I'm a little burned out on this spread, so I may move on to the next page and start setting up the next scene in Poser.
And by "burned out," I mean I think I've been working on it so long that I'm starting to get lost in details that may not matter. I think I need to step back a little bit and let it rest before I start adding the finishing touches.
During my 1st attempt, I had the wrong camera selected, but I tried several times with the Edge Blend camera selected. I even read the maunal's quick start guide and it wouldn't work. Both the scenes I tried to render had already been created. I didn't have time to try creating a new sceane.
Unfortunantly, I won't have time to play with this again until Wednesday and I won't have much time. Hopefully, I can figure out what I'm doing wrong. Also, there is a FAQ thread that I'll check out and see if anyone else had this problem.