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@LoreMistress Izaria as little as possible actually!
I mainly just add some grain, chromatic aberration and some sharpening. I also tend to render out at twice the size I need and then scale by half in Photoshop which gives the outlines the kind of look that I like. For this one in particular I rendered it out with opacity and added the background.
But to give you an idea of how it looks without editing here's a spin-around of the model in Daz with Octane's live view
https://youtube.com/shorts/8joDZ1xXzH4?feature=share
I've just had a hankering to play with PwToon lately.
Holy cow. I haven't played with Octane. Thanks so much for posting that.
Some more testing with G9
LoreMistress Izaria, Phloki3D, vrba79:
Great work! Thanks so much for sharing.
I'll post my recent renders too very soon.
Cheers!
I might have to look into this Octane thing. I need a good alternative to Iray. How easy is it to get up and running? What are the render times like?
@vrba79
Assuming you have the compatible hardware, the setup of the Octane plugin itself is straightforward and fast, however, I can’t really recommend it as an “out of the box” solution for NPR renders. It can take some time to get used to the interface and simply applying iRay materials won't work for example.
The toon shader itself can be quite frustrating too and a lot of the work comes down to texturing. The outlines are unpredictable and definitely not as clean as some of the other solutions out there - for my style it works, for others it may not. This largely depends on the results you're looking to achieve.
RE: Render times, with the toon shader its near-instant as your GPU isn’t really crunching any difficult light calculations - hence there aren’t any shadows on my characters apart from those I’ve painted into the texture maps and the ground plane which is a non-toon shadow catcher.
All that being said, if you do play around with Octane I'd love to see your results and I'm happy to help where I can! And in the meantime here's my latest render
LoreMistress Izaria, vrba79:
The free Octane Render Kit for Daz came out a while back. It doesn't seem like it got picked up quickly, for the reasons cited above. I believe a few of the PAs use it for photorealistic product renders. Can't cite which ones though.
That said, Octane has a good following in industry and among hobbyists. If I can interest you in one example, this fellow's Instagram feed showcases amazing NPR work using Octane.
Phloki3D really deserves high commendations for exploring Octane NPR!
Cheers!
Playing around with a new material setup today which is quite promising. A comparison below with the new material on the left, which is far better at producing internal lines (most noticeable on the hat) and a little more definition in areas (lips, hands, fingernails). The figure on the right uses the default Toon shader.
Okay. Poked around with it a bit. I love it's material editor. Its very much like the old Poser material room! That's something I can understand.
That's awesome, I'm looking forward to seeing what you can come up with!
I've been tweaking and testing all day, finally happy with the results
Very nice!
I'll be giving it a proper tutorial viewing after work tomorrow.
The one thing that I can't grasp yet, is how to light the Octane toon materials.
Love the Octane NPR images.
Question about Octane Renderer -- Can it be used offline on a closed-off system, or is it another one that has to be online for usage/install/registration/etc.?
The free version that works with Daz Studio seems to need a persistent online connection. Probably the trade-off for it being free.
vrba79,
I remember consulting this Octane tutorial to learn how to light a scene. That was a while back, when I used Daz-Octane for photorealism.
DaremoK3,
There was a Daz-Octane tutorial by valzheimer at the forums years back. It's hard to find it now. Interestingly, tThere is an external forum at Otoy that's Daz specific. That'll likely be a good resource. Finally, apart from the work done by Phloki3D, I also refer people to this Instagram feed that showcases Octane NPR.
Cheers!
@vrba79 from what I've learned, there is no way to effectively light the toon materials. Apparently, the feature works in the standalone version of Octane or its Blender, C4D plugins etc, but not within the Daz plugin. I haven't bothered exporting and importing into the standalone because it would just be too slow of a workflow.
You can add specularity to the materials (switch to Camera light in Toon Lighting Mode in the material itself), and generate shadows with Normal maps, but as I've stated previously the shadows aren't really ray traced and adding lights to the scene won't affect the toon materials themselves whatsoever - so controlling light direction and such isn't really possible. The specularity and shadows seem to just generate based on geometry and its intensity based on the specular and roughness values in the material itself.
Phloki3D,
Thanks for the clarification. I guess one can only go so far with the free Daz-Octane version.
I'm just extrapolating from my workflow with Daz-Blender-CSP here ... could you render a separate image, with iRay for instance, in which the shadow is apparent -- let's call it Shadow Layer. Then in the post-edit:
(1) Layer the Shadow Layer on top of your NPR/Toon Layer.
(2) Create a new mask layer tracing only the shadow outlines in the Shadow Layer
(3) After disabling the Shadow Layer, use the mask layer and color in the shadows as a new layer; by playing with the opacity and mode (darken, mulitply, etc.) of this new layer, you can overlay it on the Toon Layer in the way you want, creating the shadows.
More or less that's my workflow. It's how I combine two Blender renders: the NPR with the line art; then manually fill in the shadows in post-edit. The key there of course is that all the renders have the same camera viewport plus the same lighting angles.
Cheers!
Phloki3D, vrba79:
Heres' what I was trying to explain in the previous ^^^ post.
Cheers!
Sgt. Inez: Apartment Ambush | Daz assets & set up | Blender Eevee render | Clip Stuido Paint post-edit
Yeah. I'm not loving Octane.
Anyway here's something I whipped up with Aiko 6, Pwtoon and a little postwork.
Thank you, all who responded, informed decisions are paramount...
@csaa :
I don't log in or post often, but this is one of my daily reads, and I checked out that Instagram feed the first time you posted it -- Great examples there.
Haven't had time to contribute anything to the thread in a while -- All my free time is spent on coding, so eventually I can contribute to the caliber I am shooting for.
@csaa yup, that'd work, I just try and do everything in as few render passes and with as little post work as possible. So instead I opt to just fake the toon look on certain objects that need to catch shadows. This only really works for my style though as I'm mainly going for a flatter and hand-drawn look anyway.
@vrba79 great renders though, Octane is definitely an acquired taste I know that much!
Here's my latest test
Very nice!