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Non-photorealistic Renders (NPR)

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  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    crocodilian said:

    FWIW, my workflow has always been to render in 3D, and then convert to a painterly style in a 2D application.

    There are a few algorithms which actually make good use of 3D info, but most of the painterly effects can be achieved more quickly-- and with iterative control-- as a Photoshop action. The problem with doing the painterly process in the render is that its not interactive or iterative-- you either like what you get at the end or not.

    For Mac users, Studio Artist is particularly fun. . .

    One exotic application that was a great deal of fun, and made use of 3D information is the sorely missed Piranesi (now moribund); intended for the architectural renderings, it was a fun tool for working with characters. . .

    Attached, a very dull render of a steampunk airship, and a version with a little Photoshop tweaking, much more atmospheric; a few minutes in Photoshop, but a real bear to try to get all this as a shader.

    Hey crocodilian - not sure how I missed your post earlier this year, but I just ran across it for the first time. I enjoy steampunk stuff myself, and your renders are great! Do you have any links to any more of your work?

    Thanks for taking the time to post a little bit about your workflow and tools you use. I'm checking out the Piranesi gallery now - very cool stuff!

    - Greg

     

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    edited July 2016

    I'm so glad algovincian turned me onto this thread today after seeing his LAMH beaver in another thread. I never knew what people meant by NPR in other threads, and had I known, I would have been all over this thread before today.

    As some may have seen me popping into the threads, usually asking for help or complaining about something, lol, my goals and projects for Daz are usually not attempts at photoreal, but more of a classic art goal. I was turned onto art via sci-fi/fantasy book covers and as a result, why I spent six years in art school. Here are a few of my latest book covers that started in Daz, a couple book interior illustrations, and an older 'Daz' NPR cover (just one I haven't shown in awhile). All are in DS 4.7 or earlier, all 3DL, and use FilterForge to one degree or another....

      

      

     

    Post edited by WillowRaven on
  • Ghosty12Ghosty12 Posts: 2,058
    edited July 2016

    This is one of mine using a new piece of software I found while surfing the net.. The images were put through Pastello for the drawn look and the page was done with Comiclife 3..  The vampire morph was made by me with Sculptris.. :D

     

     

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  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787

    Very cool, ghosty. :D The vampire reminds me of Drucilla on Buffy.

  • Ghosty12Ghosty12 Posts: 2,058
    edited July 2016
    WillowRaven said:

    Very cool, ghosty. :D The vampire reminds me of Drucilla on Buffy.

    Thank you.. :) About the only problem is I can't do finer detail to the morph because do not have access to the special PA only HD morph pack..  Which sucks but ah well.. :(

    Post edited by Ghosty12 on
  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    WillowRaven said:

    I'm so glad algovincian turned me onto this thread today after seeing his LAMH beaver in another thread. I never knew what people meant by NPR in other threads, and had I know, I would have been all over this thread before today.

    As some may have seen me popping into the threads, usually asking for help or complaining about something, lol, my goals and projects for Daz are usually not attempts at photoreal, but more of a classic art goal. I was turned onto art via sci-fi/fantasy book covers and as a result, why I spent six years in art school. Here are a few of my latest book covers that started in Daz, a couple book interior illustrations, and an older 'Daz' NPR cover (just one I haven't shown in awhile). All are in DS 4.7 or earlier, all 3DL, and use FilterForge to one degree or another....

      

      

     

    These are great, Willow - nice wide variety of styles! I particularly like the paint effect on Archiver Manhunt.

    - Greg

  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    ghosty12 said:
    WillowRaven said:

    Very cool, ghosty. :D The vampire reminds me of Drucilla on Buffy.

    Thank you.. :) About the only problem is I can't do finer detail to the morph because do not have access to the special PA only HD morph pack..  Which sucks but ah well.. :(

    Have you considered creating a higher poly mesh with as much detail as you want, and then baking normal & displacement maps? There are many programs that will do it (Blender for one).

    - Greg

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    algovincian said:

    These are great, Willow - nice wide variety of styles! I particularly like the paint effect on Archiver Manhunt.

    - Greg

    Thanks, algovincian. I try to create a slightly new look with every book cover. I think it's a disservice to the book and author if all of the covers I work on look alike. I'll probably never get famous or be recognized by my work, lol, but as long as the bills are getting paid, I can handle that. 

    :D

  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798
    edited July 2017

    WillowRaven:

    You were working in NPR all along, and just didn't know it.  Great work, and I love the painterly ones as well.

     

    Click to enlarge:

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  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798
    edited July 2017

    Some more...

    Click to enlarge:

     

     

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    Post edited by DaremoK3 on
  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798

    ghostly12:

    That is an awesome comic page.

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    DaremoK3 said:

    WillowRaven:

    You were working in NPR all along, and just didn't know it.  Great work, and I love the painterly ones as well.

    I know, lol. Never even knew what NPR meant, lol.

    How did you get the clean lines on the first and third ninja turtles?

  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798

    The first ninja turtle is all ToonyCam Pro inside of DS, and the third is a composite of ToonyCam Pro, FotoSketcher, and Perfectum filter.

     

    FotoSketcher leaves edges aliased with that technique, so I process further with Perfectum to smooth out the ailiasing.  You can find link to Perfectum in one of my posts above.  For FotoSketcher (free), you can find here:

    http://fotosketcher.com/

     

    I know you didn't ask, but to round it out, the second turtle image is ToonyCam Pro and FotoSketcher as well.

  • Frank__Frank__ Posts: 302

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough. I still want to know how Greg managed to automize different pictures into some convincing NPR-picture, and I still want to pay for it.

    Some of my humble/useless attempts:

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  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    Frank__ said:

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough. I still want to know how Greg managed to automize different pictures into some convincing NPR-picture, and I still want to pay for it.

    Some of my humble/useless attempts:

    These look great, Frank - I like the image of the woman holding the bird, and your comic looks very polished. What software did you use?

    Your comment about getting the same code to generate decent NPR for *all* scenes is insightful. This is exactly why my distributed network renders a batch of scenes every night (often the same scenes night after night). First thing I do every morning is check last night's batch. When I make a change to the code to address something that I saw in last night's output, it effects how every scene will be rendered. Getting to this point has been a long process that has taken over 2 decades, and "evolutionary" is really the best way to describe it. Slow, incremental changes . . .

    - Greg

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    Frank__ said:

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough. I still want to know how Greg managed to automize different pictures into some convincing NPR-picture, and I still want to pay for it.

    Some of my humble/useless attempts:

    Would it be horrible of me to ask your process for the woman in pink w/ the bird? I really like it. :D

  • Frank__Frank__ Posts: 302
    WillowRaven said:
    Frank__ said:

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough. I still want to know how Greg managed to automize different pictures into some convincing NPR-picture, and I still want to pay for it.

    Some of my humble/useless attempts:

    Would it be horrible of me to ask your process for the woman in pink w/ the bird? I really like it. :D

    Not sooo horrible :)

    This is an example for "little" postwork; it's an older pic, simple lights, it was more a test of dynamic clothing and I wanted to render one time one of Ken's birds. Actually I don't remember which filter I used, but I put the render into an (older) version of Corel Painter and experimented with the filters. But I remember it was nothing fancy, while the other examples have layers over layers of different postwork.

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    Frank__ said:

    Not sooo horrible :)

    This is an example for "little" postwork; it's an older pic, simple lights, it was more a test of dynamic clothing and I wanted to render one time one of Ken's birds. Actually I don't remember which filter I used, but I put the render into an (older) version of Corel Painter and experimented with the filters. But I remember it was nothing fancy, while the other examples have layers over layers of different postwork.

    Oddly, my favorite one you claim took the least work, lol. Do you have a favorite filter source?

  • Frank__Frank__ Posts: 302
    algovincian said:
    Frank__ said:

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough. I still want to know how Greg managed to automize different pictures into some convincing NPR-picture, and I still want to pay for it.

    Some of my humble/useless attempts:

    These look great, Frank - I like the image of the woman holding the bird, and your comic looks very polished. What software did you use?

    Your comment about getting the same code to generate decent NPR for *all* scenes is insightful. This is exactly why my distributed network renders a batch of scenes every night (often the same scenes night after night). First thing I do every morning is check last night's batch. When I make a change to the code to address something that I saw in last night's output, it effects how every scene will be rendered. Getting to this point has been a long process that has taken over 2 decades, and "evolutionary" is really the best way to describe it. Slow, incremental changes . . .

    - Greg

    Hi Greg, thanks for your comment.

    As mentioned in my answer to WillowRaven the woman /w bird was easy on the postwork-side. And I like the NPR-effect on this picture, but it's much more difficult to get this effect on a "complete" picture with fore-, middle- and background. Especially if someone has a faible for difficult, underlit scenery :)

    Software: render in Carrara, sometimes with Multipass which gives e.g. an ambient pass, which is better for line tracing, or a second render with 100% ambient light, which is even better for line tracing. For postwork I use PostworkshopPro, which has every filter I've seen mentioned in various threads on NPR in one program (there's only so much you can do with filtering, but I think PWS covers 85% for NPRs - no I'm not connected, don't get any money :) ) Final composing in Corel Paint or Photoshop Elements (hey, I have 7.500 DAZ products in DIM, so I have no money for a fancy program like Photoshop - wait, think, maybe I should check my preferences :) ). Comic-layout, bubbles and lettering is made in CorelDraw.

  • Frank__Frank__ Posts: 302
    WillowRaven said:
    Frank__ said:

    Not sooo horrible :)

    This is an example for "little" postwork; it's an older pic, simple lights, it was more a test of dynamic clothing and I wanted to render one time one of Ken's birds. Actually I don't remember which filter I used, but I put the render into an (older) version of Corel Painter and experimented with the filters. But I remember it was nothing fancy, while the other examples have layers over layers of different postwork.

    Oddly, my favorite one you claim took the least work, lol. Do you have a favorite filter source?

    It's my favourite, too. But as I mentioned in my answer to Greg: the problem is foreground, middleground and background together. Having some isolated object in the foreground is much easier for the filters to do their magic.I guess you could even come up with reasonable results with this kind of picture with the build-in filters of every wide-spread application.

    Favourite filter source: as in my answer to Greg: PWS.(I know your work, because I try to follow every dynamic clothing thread, and so I think you don't need this whole 15-layers-of-filter thing; you usualy have a prominent foreground and some slightly blurry background and you compose those things. As mentioned: for isolated foreground objects Painter is sufficient. And if not: no size fits all.)

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Experimenting with a strict B&W style some more...

     

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  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,547
    timmins.william said:

    Experimenting with a strict B&W style some more...

     

    Whoa! Chilling image! Nice work!

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    What's great about the style is that it renders FAST. Even at 2160x2160, basic scenes take maybe 10 mins, tops.

    (I'm doing a 2160x2160 with LAMH which is taking close to an hour, but hey. That's a lot of hairs)

     

  • WillowRavenWillowRaven Posts: 3,787
    edited July 2016

    Just wanted to share my latest NPR book cover art. (Hope no one mind I also shared it in the LAMH thread.)

     

      

    "It's the kind of book that made me resent the obligations of ordinary life because I just wanted to keep reading." 

                                        -- Sharon Shinn, bestselling author of the Samaria series.

    In a world where a half-hidden war has finally revealed to ordinary humans the supernatural creatures that surround them, safety is hard to find for a girl like Natividad.

    Born Pure, one of the rare girls able to wield protective magic against demonic forces, Natividad and her brothers are on their own and on the run, with terrible memories and terrible enemies behind them.  The only possible shelter might be found with their father's kin, the infamous black dogs of Dimilioc . . . if they can win acceptance. But when their enemies track them to their new home, neither Natividad nor her brothers nor Dimilioc itself may survive . . .

    Post edited by Chohole on
  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,547

    @WillowRaven Excellent work! Great composition and sense of danger with both her body language and the lighting. Awesome job! 

  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484
    edited July 2016

    Here's the first multi-panel page I've ever created in Manga Studio 5. I have used it in the past to create single images, but it's time to dive into the comic world. The base images were created using two passes in Poser using the Comic Book Preview. The first pass is for the dark shadows, the second (made by moving the lights just a little) is for the gray shadows. Additonal inking and clean-up (plus the tones) were applied in MS5. NOTE: This is a tweaked version of the image I uploaded to my gallery. 

    BTW: This is page 2 of a 6-8 page story I am working on (I originally thought I could do it in 5 pages, but that now seems unlikely). Additional character sketches can be found in my gallery, if you're interested. I'd love your thoughts and comments on them, if you're so inclined. (Also, I uploaded a print-quality image so you can see the details, if you're interested -- just click on it to see).

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  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484
    timmins.william said:

    Experimenting with a strict B&W style some more...

    Will: That is VERY impressive! I'm going to go back through this forum to see if you explain any more about the techniques you're using to get that crisp, clean line. Although I like the wood on the chair, have you tried playing with the bump maps to get more control of the way this renders. Everything else (except his hair) is so stark, and this is kinda soft in comparison, that I'm wondering if the bump maps could be ajdjusted to improve the way this object renders in a way that's still got texture, but is a bit more "in-line" with the rest of the image, if you know what I mean.

  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484
    Frank__ said:
    algovincian said:
    Frank__ said:

    One thing I learned while trying to make a convincing NPR-picture - and still trying: one size doesn't fit all. Sometimes even little postwork makes a picture look okay, sometimes extensive postwork isn't enough...

    These look great, Frank - I like the image of the woman holding the bird, and your comic looks very polished. What software did you use?

    . . . 

    - Greg

    Hi Greg, thanks for your comment.

    As mentioned in my answer to WillowRaven the woman /w bird was easy on the postwork-side. And I like the NPR-effect on this picture, but it's much more difficult to get this effect on a "complete" picture with fore-, middle- and background. Especially if someone has a faible for difficult, underlit scenery :)

    It's nice to read that others share my opinion on separating the elements of a composition into separate pieces. Even if I compose a scene to include all of the elements that will be used in the final render (which I often don't -- in my comic page above, for example, the figures in panel one were in separate files and composited in Manga Studio), I often hide each of the pieces so that I can isolate the various figures on different layers in Photoshop. Sometimes I even go so far as to isolate specific items of clothing, like belts, boots and hats so that I can easily apply an outline to the shapes and quickly edit them as separate objects. This takes a little time up front, but it saves a TON of time in postwork. It also lets me very quickly edit out hair that might be sticking out through a hat or interfering with clothing.

  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,547
    mmitchell_houston said:

    Here's the first multi-panel page I've ever created in Manga Studio 5. I have used it in the past to create single images, but it's time to dive into the comic world. The base images were created using two passes in Poser using the Comic Book Preview. The first pass is for the dark shadows, the second (made by moving the lights just a little) is for the gray shadows. Additonal inking and clean-up (plus the tones) were applied in MS5. NOTE: This is a tweaked version of the image I uploaded to my gallery. 

    BTW: This is page 2 of a 6-8 page story I am working on (I originally thought I could do it in 5 pages, but that now seems unlikely). Additional character sketches can be found in my gallery, if you're interested. I'd love your thoughts and comments on them, if you're so inclined. (Also, I uploaded a print-quality image so you can see the details, if you're interested -- just click on it to see).

    Nicely done - looks like an old-school comic. :) I like the halftone shading. 

  • david_macraedavid_macrae Posts: 109
    edited July 2016

    This is an awesome thread.  I am very interested in NPR style renders. I am however a poser user so I do not come here that often, except to shop ;- ) but I will now to follow your progress. I am an animator interested in expanding the ability of making anime style 2d animation from 3d software.

    You can see what I have done on my blog: Witchhunter.us

    Cheers, David 

    PS Mike I am loving your work.  I sent you a PM over at rendo :-)

    Post edited by david_macrae on
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