More Non-photorealisitic Renders (NPR II)

Artini

Nice work.

Funny thing, I have a Deckard renderer in Unity, but have not guessed that it is related to Blade Runner character.

 

Artini

Now, that we have official support from Daz3D to Unity - https://www.daz3d.com/daz-to-unity-bridge

I spend more time experimenting with it.

Below are some NPR renders of https://www.daz3d.com/ahmunet-for-genesis-8-female

made in Unity.

tkdrobert

Baby Yoda

3Diva

@tkdrobert Dawwww So cute! :D

 

tkdrobert

Boba Fett with color pencils effect

Oso3D

Playing around with a samurai cat...

3Diva

Millawa 8 "tooned". lol I mixed in some Bebe High and Star 2.0 (transferred to G8F).

3Diva

Aiko Toon and Toonimal Puppy.

vrba79

Aiko Toon. Haven't seen that one in a while!

3Diva

vrba79 said:

Aiko Toon. Haven't seen that one in a while!

Yeah, sadly Daz pulled it from the store last year. But (thankfully) 3D Universe has made it available still through them: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4594656/#Comment_4594656

vrba79

I'm surprsed Daz hasn't just shut down all older figures, just to shove Genesis 8 down everyone's throats yet.

tkdrobert

I don't know why you would say that.  Daz has never done it.

juvesatriani

hi NPR citizens

After having headache try to understand and learning Blender`s Freestyle , I think for now I`ll be stick with DAZ Outline render features. 
It maybe not advance or powerful as Freestyle but I think I can find trick to suit my need , especially since I`m mostly tend to tinkering the outcome with Photosop and Affinity Designer

Here some simple Render and postwork in Photoshop . I`ll share the PSD file ih Gdrive if anyone interest to further enhance this simple images

EDIT L It seems My monitor not quite right and all my images looked wash out . Sorry guys 

kenmo

Christmas Eve Night in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia...

A snowman and Christmas tree near the Lighthouse are ready for Christmas morning in Peggys' Cove, Nova Scotia.

A digital illustration I created for Christmas 2020 using Blender 2.92 (model the lighthouse), 3D Coat 4.9 (texture lighthouse), snowman, Christmas tree, fishing boat & houses are 3D props I have obtained over the years. Rendered in Vue Creator 1.5 with postwork using Photoshop 2021 CC & Topaz Studio 2.

 

tkdrobert

Pretty

kenmo said:

Christmas Eve Night in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia...

A snowman and Christmas tree near the Lighthouse are ready for Christmas morning in Peggys' Cove, Nova Scotia.

A digital illustration I created for Christmas 2020 using Blender 2.92 (model the lighthouse), 3D Coat 4.9 (texture lighthouse), snowman, Christmas tree, fishing boat & houses are 3D props I have obtained over the years. Rendered in Vue Creator 1.5 with postwork using Photoshop 2021 CC & Topaz Studio 2.

 

 

 

 

mmitchell_houston

kenmo said:

Christmas Eve Night in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia...

A snowman and Christmas tree near the Lighthouse are ready for Christmas morning in Peggys' Cove, Nova Scotia.

A digital illustration I created for Christmas 2020 using Blender 2.92 (model the lighthouse), 3D Coat 4.9 (texture lighthouse), snowman, Christmas tree, fishing boat & houses are 3D props I have obtained over the years. Rendered in Vue Creator 1.5 with postwork using Photoshop 2021 CC & Topaz Studio 2.

 

Merry Christmas to you, and thanks for sharing this.

vrba79

This one I had some fun with. I reduced the colors to the palatte you would find on a Commodore 64, and even went so far as to stretch the pixel aspect to a similar ratio. Because to do colorful graphics, the C64 would stretch the pixels horizontally. I didn't stretch them to quite the 1:2 ratio however, as I didn't want the pic looking too stretched. 

 

TheNathanParable

Personally I would've squished the image by half and then stretched it. That way you get the double width pixels while still retaining the general proportions.

mmitchell_houston

vrba79 said:

This one I had some fun with. I reduced the colors to the palatte you would find on a Commodore 64, and even went so far as to stretch the pixel aspect to a similar ratio. Because to do colorful graphics, the C64 would stretch the pixels horizontally. I didn't stretch them to quite the 1:2 ratio however, as I didn't want the pic looking too stretched. 

I definitely get the retro vibe, but not 100% sure about that shade of purple from the old C64 (I recently played with an online emulator, and it was fun to go back and look at the stuff we used do on that computer). This definitely is a winner, though. Can you replicate the look for a multi-panel comic?

juvesatriani

Having fun with Filament  - Daz Outline (script) render and Photoshop

 

juvesatriani

3Diva said:

@thedoctor Those TwinMotion renders look great! 

Thank you so much @3Diva. I enjoy your posts so much and appreciate how much you devote to this community. 

I am glad this is an active thread with people who are passionate about the medium. This weekend I spent some time on the PencilJack forum, which is comprised almost exclusively of artists who are comic "purists." I found it interesting and useful to get a better understanding of how 3D comics are perceived by traditional artists. They have a pretty cool ongoing competition called PUMMEL in which artists go head-to-head. The rules forbid use of any 3D except as a guide and only if the artist personally created and mapped the models used. One member even commented "What about use of 3d? It's 2017, are we going to start using digital tools that some comics professionals actually use or continue plodding along as usual with no real justification?" Another member admitted he used 3D on 90% of his paid work for clients. 

There was also a fascinating discussion looking at how the great artist Brandon Peterson began using 3D references for his work around 2015.

Yeah, I think a lot of "purists" think that 3D is a crutch, but really it's an extremely valuable tool. People create comics simply for the love of comics - you'll never get rich making comics (unless you are one of a very small handful of the top artists working for Marvel or DC), and comics take an extraordinary amount of time to create. An entire team of people from writers, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, to editor are all usually needed to produce "traditionally drawn" comics at a fast enough rate to even be remotely viable for hitting a release schedule on time. And even then, unless the comic is super popular, you'll really not make enough to make a decent living. Six different people needing to be paid from the sale of a single comic. However, when 3D enters the picture it can greatly speed up production, and essentially allow a single person to take on the role of what "traditionally" usually requires an entire team of people. It opens the doors for so many who normally wouldn't be able to tell their stories in this medium (not without a Ton of Cash and/or VAST amounts of time to do all the drawing, inking, coloring, and lettering by themselves).

3D is an incredible tool that opens doors that would otherwise have remained shut. Storytellers, on a fairly modest shoestring budget, can tell their own stories, in their own ways, and in their own time - and that is HUGELY liberating. 

@thedoctor Those TwinMotion renders look great! 

One member added this comment:

"I agree there is some nice sophisticated stuff going on in the 3d page. There are obvious advantages to 3d: dynamic camera angles, lighting/shadow information, accurate linear perspective, reuseable assets, speed, etc. One drawback, at least in Peterson's 2015 sample, is that I think he used pre-made 3d figures from software like Poser or Daz Studio, which tend to produce stiff poses. I've noticed that artists who can model and rig their own 3d characters generally have a better chance at fluidity a la Pixar"

Other members are simply adamant that using 3D leads to "lifeless" pages. 

I think that a lot of premade poses can be pretty stiff, one has to learn to pose their figures with dynamic energy. Camera angles can play a big role in that too. In traditional comics the bodies are usually drawn as if they are "coiled springs" - they are either released and "sprung" or compressed and coiled and ready to spring. You rarely see them in a stage that lacks energy. Take the following page from Captain America for example. This is an EXTREME example, and of course, a lot of comics will not need to show this extreme level of energy - but it does show that dynamic energy is often needed for the poses and the camera angles in order to convey action and motion.

Look at Captain's body in the first panel - it's like a coiled spring that has just been released and all the force and energy of it expelled upon the enemy that he's punching. And his body in the third panel: crouched a bit lower, compacted - again like a spring, but this time coiled and ready to be sprung. Dynamic poses go a long way to help bring energy and motion to the panels/scenes.

At the same time, using dynamic camera angles also can help inject a lot of energy into the panels/scenes. Take the second panel for instance - the hand and gun are huge, the biggest things in the panel conveying their importance and the urgency of the situation. The extreme perspective not only puts the gun and the hand reaching for it as the main focus but also injects more energy into the scene. 

Again, that page is an EXTREME example, and not all comic pages will (or even should) be that extreme. But it illustrates how movement and energy can be brought to the scene by purposefully adding dynamic energy to the poses, camera angles, and perspectives. 

In many successful comics, even when two people are just shown taking, their hands, shoulders, and faces are usually extremely expressive and show energy. With static images one can't show true motion, so motion and energy often needs to be added to the poses, expressions, and camera angles in order to convey that "motion". That is something that 3D comic creators sometimes lack and it can lead to pages that (as was pointed out) feel "lifeless". However, when creating your scenes, if one can keep "dynamic energy" in mind when setting up poses, expressions, and camera angles, it can really breath life into the scenes.

I agree with @Diva explanation about camera and Pose . I do believe thats because people already familliar with what or how images in comic presented to us so many years ahead . 

Its not about right or wrong body or movement proportions - Shadow and bounce lights  captured in image form (which 3D superior and accurate in this area) but its about how to brought Exaggerate emotions/actions via images. Its hard to get same effect without breaking the 3D laws ;)

I saw several Behind the scene of Cel Shading Games which showed me how they bent the rules of 3D via carefully scalling several body part and camera placement to make equivalent with what people brain already familiar with 2D mediums. 

3D tools actually really good tools to help story teller in many ways , but we just need to always breaking the rules about it if we want to dive in already established format just like comic or cel shading world . Liquify in Photoshop is one of useful feature to help us to achieve it . Some people just ignore the face and choose to draw the eyes or expressions to reduce what comic purist called as "lifeless"

 

 

 

 

 

juvesatriani

I think I like  Filament  - Daz Outline (script) render and Photoshop combo 

 

Artini

juvesatriani said:

I think I like  Filament  - Daz Outline (script) render and Photoshop combo 

 

That looks nice. I have also wondered if Filament could be used for NPR renders.

Have to explore it myself.

 

nya1963

As a celebration for the sailor moon new movie "sailor moon Eternal". Cloths and hair are from "sailor moon project" except boots. Boots are from "DAZ Aiko3.0 Sexy Uniform SET by makoto" instead of sailor boots. Because I could not extract the zip file of sailor boots. So boots in this image are not sailor moon costume.

juvesatriani

nya1963 said:

As a celebration for the sailor moon new movie "sailor moon Eternal". Cloths and hair are from "sailor moon project" except boots. Boots are from "DAZ Aiko3.0 Sexy Uniform SET by makoto" instead of sailor boots. Because I could not extract the zip file of sailor boots. So boots in this image are not sailor moon costume.

 

Awesome !!

tkdrobert

Mando and Grogu

vrba79

tkdrobert said:

Mando and Grogu

This is the way.

mmitchell_houston

tkdrobert said:

Mando and Grogu

Looks really good, buddy. Composition is nice, and you did a great job on the armor reflections.

Now... I just need to sit down and actually watch this series!

mmitchell_houston

juvesatriani said:

3Diva said:

@thedoctor Those TwinMotion renders look great! 

Thank you so much @3Diva. I enjoy your posts so much and appreciate how much you devote to this community. 

I am glad this is an active thread with people who are passionate about the medium. This weekend I spent some time on the PencilJack forum, which is comprised almost exclusively of artists who are comic "purists." I found it interesting and useful to get a better understanding of how 3D comics are perceived by traditional artists. They have a pretty cool ongoing competition called PUMMEL in which artists go head-to-head. The rules forbid use of any 3D except as a guide and only if the artist personally created and mapped the models used. One member even commented "What about use of 3d? It's 2017, are we going to start using digital tools that some comics professionals actually use or continue plodding along as usual with no real justification?" Another member admitted he used 3D on 90% of his paid work for clients. 

There was also a fascinating discussion looking at how the great artist Brandon Peterson began using 3D references for his work around 2015.

Yeah, I think a lot of "purists" think that 3D is a crutch, but really it's an extremely valuable tool. People create comics simply for the love of comics - you'll never get rich making comics (unless you are one of a very small handful of the top artists working for Marvel or DC), and comics take an extraordinary amount of time to create. An entire team of people from writers, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, to editor are all usually needed to produce "traditionally drawn" comics at a fast enough rate to even be remotely viable for hitting a release schedule on time. And even then, unless the comic is super popular, you'll really not make enough to make a decent living. Six different people needing to be paid from the sale of a single comic. However, when 3D enters the picture it can greatly speed up production, and essentially allow a single person to take on the role of what "traditionally" usually requires an entire team of people. It opens the doors for so many who normally wouldn't be able to tell their stories in this medium (not without a Ton of Cash and/or VAST amounts of time to do all the drawing, inking, coloring, and lettering by themselves).

3D is an incredible tool that opens doors that would otherwise have remained shut. Storytellers, on a fairly modest shoestring budget, can tell their own stories, in their own ways, and in their own time - and that is HUGELY liberating. 

@thedoctor Those TwinMotion renders look great! 

One member added this comment:

"I agree there is some nice sophisticated stuff going on in the 3d page. There are obvious advantages to 3d: dynamic camera angles, lighting/shadow information, accurate linear perspective, reuseable assets, speed, etc. One drawback, at least in Peterson's 2015 sample, is that I think he used pre-made 3d figures from software like Poser or Daz Studio, which tend to produce stiff poses. I've noticed that artists who can model and rig their own 3d characters generally have a better chance at fluidity a la Pixar"

Other members are simply adamant that using 3D leads to "lifeless" pages. 

I think that a lot of premade poses can be pretty stiff, one has to learn to pose their figures with dynamic energy. Camera angles can play a big role in that too. In traditional comics the bodies are usually drawn as if they are "coiled springs" - they are either released and "sprung" or compressed and coiled and ready to spring. You rarely see them in a stage that lacks energy. Take the following page from Captain America for example. This is an EXTREME example, and of course, a lot of comics will not need to show this extreme level of energy - but it does show that dynamic energy is often needed for the poses and the camera angles in order to convey action and motion.

Look at Captain's body in the first panel - it's like a coiled spring that has just been released and all the force and energy of it expelled upon the enemy that he's punching. And his body in the third panel: crouched a bit lower, compacted - again like a spring, but this time coiled and ready to be sprung. Dynamic poses go a long way to help bring energy and motion to the panels/scenes.

At the same time, using dynamic camera angles also can help inject a lot of energy into the panels/scenes. Take the second panel for instance - the hand and gun are huge, the biggest things in the panel conveying their importance and the urgency of the situation. The extreme perspective not only puts the gun and the hand reaching for it as the main focus but also injects more energy into the scene. 

Again, that page is an EXTREME example, and not all comic pages will (or even should) be that extreme. But it illustrates how movement and energy can be brought to the scene by purposefully adding dynamic energy to the poses, camera angles, and perspectives. 

In many successful comics, even when two people are just shown taking, their hands, shoulders, and faces are usually extremely expressive and show energy. With static images one can't show true motion, so motion and energy often needs to be added to the poses, expressions, and camera angles in order to convey that "motion". That is something that 3D comic creators sometimes lack and it can lead to pages that (as was pointed out) feel "lifeless". However, when creating your scenes, if one can keep "dynamic energy" in mind when setting up poses, expressions, and camera angles, it can really breath life into the scenes.

I agree with @Diva explanation about camera and Pose . I do believe that's because people already familiar with what or how images in comic presented to us so many years ahead . 

Its not about right or wrong body or movement proportions - Shadow and bounce lights  captured in image form (which 3D superior and accurate in this area) but its about how to brought Exaggerate emotions/actions via images. Its hard to get same effect without breaking the 3D laws ;)

I saw several Behind the scene of Cel Shading Games which showed me how they bent the rules of 3D via carefully scaling several body part and camera placement to make equivalent with what people brain already familiar with 2D mediums. 

3D tools actually really good tools to help story teller in many ways , but we just need to always breaking the rules about it if we want to dive in already established format just like comic or cel shading world . Liquify in Photoshop is one of useful feature to help us to achieve it . Some people just ignore the face and choose to draw the eyes or expressions to reduce what comic purist called as "lifeless"

Good observations. We get away with a LOT of things in comic art because it's the art of reduction. We cut out what's unnecessary so we can focus on what is important/what is left. Take a look at this Richie Rich comic page:

Even without reading it, we get the setting that he's in his dad's office and that he's being kind or sentimental about the old guy there. Notice how often the background is removed and replaced with simple color. Almost everything is removed except figures that are interacting to emote a scene.

I used something similar to this in my own comic: I removed the background and replaced it with a simple gray color because it was more effective to remove background clutter and just let your eyes focus on the emotions and action of the central character.

I could throw in a lot more examples, but I don't think I need to. And, although it is possible to use blurs and other camera-like effects in 3D, the 3D artist can't really take things out of the scene to simplify it for one panel because 3D is so close to real that we viewers would notice the absence of the missing elements and probably think of them as continuity errors. Now go back to the RR comic and look at the background in panel 4. Based on the other panels, there should be a painting behind Mr. Rich. But we don't see it here because the artist (wislely) removed it to eliminate clutter. If this were a 3D scene filled with realistic figures and high-def shaders, we readers would expect to see that painting behind them. In that scenario, the director/artist would probably shift the camera angle so it shifted the painting out of our view. So, even though both styles of art can achieve the same thing (simplifying backgrounds to remove unnecessary/unwanted clutter), the two styles of art can approach the matter in different ways.

plasma_ring

mmitchell_houston said:

I could throw in a lot more examples, but I don't think I need to. And, although it is possible to use blurs and other camera-like effects in 3D, the 3D artist can't really take things out of the scene to simplify it for one panel because 3D is so close to real that we viewers would notice the absence of the missing elements and probably think of them as continuity errors. Now go back to the RR comic and look at the background in panel 4. Based on the other panels, there should be a painting behind Mr. Rich. But we don't see it here because the artist (wislely) removed it to eliminate clutter. If this were a 3D scene filled with realistic figures and high-def shaders, we readers would expect to see that painting behind them. In that scenario, the director/artist would probably shift the camera angle so it shifted the painting out of our view. So, even though both styles of art can achieve the same thing (simplifying backgrounds to remove unnecessary/unwanted clutter), the two styles of art can approach the matter in different ways.

This is a super interesting breakdown and is actually one of the main reasons I started working toward a painterly style when doing 3D art--it lets me selectively keep realistic details from a render for emphasis and spend less time perfecting stuff that isn't meant to be a focus of the piece. Does the one prop that works for my background look obviously like a 3D model? Shazam, now it looks like just enough paintstrokes to let you know it exists without being distractingly weird.  

I found that the further I take an image away from photorealistic, the more I have to make the choices a 2D artist would to really sell the effect. At that point leaving in details solely for the sake of realism/continuity starts to look like a creative error, and what looks fantastic as a photorealistic shot kind of reads like I'm haphazardly copying reference without understanding what should have emphasis.

Shadow and bouncing light effects are a great example; in a photorealistic image you naturally don't want shadows falling where they obscure detail or props placed where they would be distracting, and that goes into how you set up the scene. But also the viewer is going to absorb most tiny stuff you can't control as part of a realistic environment. There is obviously stuff off camera because the picture is a snapshot of a larger environment that actually exists.

In a sketch or painting, there are no items casting shadows out of view unless the artist makes a proactive decision to put them there. They don't physically exist beyond the frame. So while you'd expect someone to paint in the suggestion of offscreen items casting shadow, it would probably be limited to the major sources--an important prop, a tree outside the window, the biggest furniture. They wouldn't spend tons of time calculating the exact light bounce of every item established in a previous shot unless they were going for photorealism, and in stylized images everything you include is likely to be parsed as a source of information. Extra information is either confusing or distracting. 

I think I've learned more about doing art by hand through reverse-engineering it for postwork than I did in years of study, but I'm coming to terms with having a backwards learning style in general.