How to Render in Layers in Daz3D?

kyleprometheus_d1f25abfdd

Hello Daz3D Luminaries,

I'm still relatively new to working in Daz3D and I am starting to pick it up.  I'm working on a comic project and have created scenes: Set, Character and Props for the story.  I want to create a 'comic style' look (I have a separate post on 3D comic shaders...) and it's a technical stumbling block to me so far.

I have read and heard that working in layers is good for post production work later.  I'm well versed in layers in 2D apps.  But layers in 3D is still new to me.  

 

How do you Render in Separate 3D Layers?

When I render a figure in Daz3D, I have the shadow casting.  But that makes it difficult to put an outline around the figure when I export the image for Post Production work in Affinity Photo as the figure has the shadow attached so I can't get a clean outline.  

What I want to do is be able to manipulate the figures, props and backgrounds separately.  Can they all be rendered on separate layers to allow me to put oulines around in Affinity Photo?  (I still want the shadows, of course, but can they be rendered on their own layers separately?  Exported and layered in after the fact?)

 

Any help, links or advice on this topic would be appreciated,

Regards,

Kyle. 

skinklizzard

You'll want to look into using canvases under the advanced render settings, you should be able to assign individual or groups of scene objects/nodes to their own canvas and enable alpha to get them as seperate layers, they will be 32 bit images though, also not sure how it handles shadows.

you could also maybe use a material ID canvas to get clean flat colours to use as mask areas in post, there was another thread about this somewhere that mentioned oso toon shaders has some helper scripts that could set this or something similar up (if I remember correctly)

Richard Haseltine

Sorry,m I started tor eply to this earlier and then got sidetracked. As skinklizzard says, use canvases. If you do separate Beauty Passes for each node list  then in Affinity Photo you will get two layers when you open them - A is the alpha, which can be used to clip the RGB layer; that RGB layer will need to be taken into the Tone Mapping Persona to bring it down for blaring white all over into something usable.

kyleprometheus_d1f25abfdd

Thank you for the replies, Skinklizzard and Richard. 

I've done my 1st canvases and I'm impressed at being able to isolate figures, props and background elements for compositing in Affinity or Gimp.  I took the exposure values down in Gimp to -11a and the 'white washed' images come back down to 'normal.'  Impressive stuff.  A lot of flexibility there.

Haven't tried the 'material ID canvas' to get 'clean flat colours' to mask areas in Post.  But that is something I'd be interested in doing.  I'll have to try and hunt that thread down.  I am looking into a getting a 'toon shader' such as Sketchy (I like the 'outline' you can get on that), Oso or Line.

I did have a 'go' at this Daz3D tutorial: 

https://blog.daz3d.com/make-comic-book-quality-cartoon-drawings-with-daz-studio/

It produced some interesting results.  You can decide which 'line' or 'depth' or 'colour' pass you want and layer it accordingly with your original render with variations of 'layer style' mixing.

An area of ongoing exploration.  Exciting.

Regards,

Kyle.