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Non-photorealistic Renders (NPR)

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  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    Widdershins Studio said:

    Not really sure what I was aiming for, but I was playing with pwToon and Photoshop. Came up with this.

    Looks like it could be on a greeting card as is - the contrast between the character and the textured BG works well together. I dig all the variations in hue, but still all green - excellent!

    - Greg

  • Widdershins StudioWiddershins Studio Posts: 539

    Thanks Greg :)

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Poking at _regular_ 3DL, used Stonemason's Dirt shader + Let it Snow: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Bronze-statue-in-the-snow-586749302

     

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283

    I've been playing with an NPR style for quite a while now. Been working more for a proper cartoon style inside of DAZ studio.

    I've been debating cleaning my setup up and organizing as a DAZ product. It's basically an automation of multiple render passes with different effects, leveraging 3Delight for the lines.

    I've attached an example. The compositing was done in GIMP.

    jungle girl composite.png
    1908 x 890 - 357K
  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484

    digneo: VERY nice. This kinda reminds me of the classic animation shaders used back in the 1980s and 1990s. Very nice, indeed.

  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484

    I just posted another NPR comic-style render, and would love some feedback on it.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/70312/wip-golden-age-superheroes

    Sorry for making you guys click-thru to it, but I'm trying to keep the comments together in one place.

    Thanks!

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283

    Hm, picture link in that thread is broken. =(

    Regarding my toolset, the shading / coloring is however you want to do it. The product (if it gets to that point) is simply going to be a convenient way to generate the line art. In the above picture, I'm using Visual Style shaders trimmed down to just ambient color with a little bit of shading, mostly.

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    djigneo said:

    Hm, picture link in that thread is broken. =(

    It appears that the image was linked from an attachment, but the attachment is no longer there, so the image link won't work

  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616
    djigneo said:

    I've been playing with an NPR style for quite a while now. Been working more for a proper cartoon style inside of DAZ studio.

    I've been debating cleaning my setup up and organizing as a DAZ product. It's basically an automation of multiple render passes with different effects, leveraging 3Delight for the lines.

    I've attached an example. The compositing was done in GIMP.

    This looks great, djigneo! Are you interested in trying to do the compositing in DS?

    - Greg

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283
    edited January 2016

    I've debated it, but I'm struggling to find a good reason to redevelop what Photoshop / GIMP and other programs do already (and better). Only thing would be a quick preview feature, but for production work, I sort of figure most artists would prefer the separate files so they can composite as they like.

    Edit: My first attempts did indeed have some image manipulation inside of DAZ, but I was finding the results inferior to ImageMagick / GIMP so I ended up consuming ImageMagick as part of my scripts for inverting colors. If I could determine why 3Delight isn't honoring line color, there'd be no need for that, really.
    Line overlays are relatively simple as far as compositing goes, but I would imagine depth maps to be part of a normal "render pass" setup, and I can't think of a "standard" way to do that. Also, I use layer effects for outlines. Right now I have them 70% transparent and set to 'Hard light' layer type. That's the complexity I'm not seeing a point of putting inside DS directly.

    At some point I think I may investigate some simple compositing in DS and if it's not too challenging work that in too. I've been rethinking my setup and trying to figure out how to make it more intuitive for others. At this point it's been just quick and dirty code to get everything to work for my uses.

    I'll try and make some more images in different styles to demonstrate the diversity of my setup. It's pretty much the same in concept to yours, just more functionality inside DS from the sounds of it. (And no need to replace material shaders mostly, although that is totally supported as well.)

    Post edited by djigneo on
  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    djigneo said:
    If I could determine why 3Delight isn't honoring line color, there'd be no need for that, really.

    Have you looked at the RIB that DS exports to see if the "edgecolor" RiDisplay param is being processed properly? White is the default, so if there's something wrong with the output syntax, it's what the renderer reverts to.

    I guess you do have the 3DL documentation, but it's here: https://3delight.atlassian.net/wiki/display/3DSP/Resources

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283
    Mustakettu85 said:
    djigneo said:
    If I could determine why 3Delight isn't honoring line color, there'd be no need for that, really.

    Have you looked at the RIB that DS exports to see if the "edgecolor" RiDisplay param is being processed properly? White is the default, so if there's something wrong with the output syntax, it's what the renderer reverts to.

    No, but that would be the logical next step. That and figuring out how to get my render script to honor the Brick camera parameters. =)

    Next time I'm in a tooling mood I'll have to see if I can figure those bits out, then I'd be in pretty good shape I think.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    I suppose I should post my updates here, now that I'm back to 3DL...

    New page in my webcomic: http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/53/

     

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283

    Thanks to @Mustakettu85's pointers, I figured out the Line color issue. Took a bit of fiddling... pretty much brute force, but I got it! You da man!

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Thanks for the outline tip! Once I figured out I had to look at the Normal output, I was golden.
     And it solves a bunch of problems I had with PWToon. Thank you all SO much... you are awesome.

     

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    I asked elsewhere, I'll ask here... are there any easy ways to generate outlines?

    PWToon and the Geoshell outline shader has a problem with surfaces perpendicular to the angle of view (turning all black).

    The Scripted 3Delight Outline tool is great, for Normal output... except facial features and similar end up really blobby and too thick.

     

    Suggestions?

     

  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,616

    Ways, yes. Easy, no. At least not that my wee pea-sized brain has been able to figure out. We all know how convoluted my process is - woot!

    - Greg

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013
    edited January 2016

    I'm having a little more success with PWToon. One thing I realized is that I hadn't properly been expanding and setting linethickness across ALL materials (I was getting really uneven results).

    And it's a huge scene with LOTS of stuff in it

     

    Post edited by Oso3D on
  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283
    timmins.william said:

    ... are there any easy ways to generate outlines?

    PWToon and the Geoshell outline shader has a problem with surfaces perpendicular to the angle of view (turning all black).

    The Scripted 3Delight Outline tool is great, for Normal output... except facial features and similar end up really blobby and too thick.

     

    Suggestions?

    My product? About 6+ months ago I was where you were, struggling to get reasonable outlines for a toon style. Like you, I tried many things, including:

    • Standard Outline script
    • ToonyCam pro (which had same shortcomings as Outline script)
    • Visual style shaders
    • Geometry shell outline shader
    • DAZ Toon shader

    I eventually took matters into my own hands, and after a long, hard-fought battle I now have:

    • A render script that creates lines like the 'Outline' Render script is supposed to, actually supporting Color ID lines, and line color.
    • A series of Shader cameras which render the scene in different ways, such as normals, fresnel, depth map, and so on.
    • A script that automates a series of renders, switching between cameras, setting the parameters of each camera to match the "main" camera which you launched the script from (so there's no need to maintain camera angles on a whole mess of cameras).

    So, my current workflow is: A) Merge my camera scene subset into the scene B) Launch the multi-camera renderer script. C) Come back 5 minutes later, composite the images on top of each other with GIMP, export. Done. Beautiful thing is that it's completely shader independent, so you can use your choice of surfaces and renderer for the main color output, and just use 3Delight for the line output.

    One of the problems with the Outline render script as you have noted is that there's not a good feedback loop for getting good lines, since it's unclear how it determines where the lines "should" be. So the approach I decided on with Camera shaders lets you see the output as it renders, so you can see where the differences in color are and thus can more accurately predict where the lines will show up.

    After I started seeing what 3Delight saw when deciding to draw lines, things became much clearer. (I ended up switching to a "Fresnel" camera for my detail lines, because I thought it gave more reasonable results than "normal" lines, which is what the standard Outline render script uses.)

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Do you have a link? :)

     

    I redid my comic, happier with the result: http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/53/

    I had been going diffuse high/low of 0%, but while that's great for linearty stuff I'd worked with elsewhere, it didn't hold up to complex lighting. I ended up going with 50% - 0%, and also going through to get a more consistent line thickness. (There are LOTS of surfaces in that scene and I discovered I hadn't been properly getting them all so I ended up with somewhat ugly results)

     

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283

    No link, because it's not an official product yet.  I'm currently in-development on some of the features. (Though what I said was working above indeed is working, so I think I've proven the concept and just need to clean things up and fix a few straggling items.) I only recently started moving towards cleaning it up for use. Hopefully before too long I'll be ready for some beta testers. (Assuming there's interest, which seemingly there is a need for this sort of thing.)

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    djigneo said:

    No link, because it's not an official product yet.  I'm currently in-development on some of the features. (Though what I said was working above indeed is working, so I think I've proven the concept and just need to clean things up and fix a few straggling items.) I only recently started moving towards cleaning it up for use. Hopefully before too long I'll be ready for some beta testers. (Assuming there's interest, which seemingly there is a need for this sort of thing.)

    The Fresnel is one approach used in either Maya or Softimage (can't remember which) but both are said to have great NPR rendering for 3DL.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    I wonder if I can do something with PWEffect. It's Phantasm effect ( http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/PWEffect-ghost-and-skeleton-closeup-586928821 ) is pretty cool.

    Then again, looking at the results, it might suffer from the same 'perpendicular surface' issue. I'll have to play with it.

     

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Huh. Looking pretty good... when I get it finished I'll link.

    But PWEffects with Opacity and Ambient modifiers all set to Curvature (Inverse) creates a very nice outline with a slightly shaded look. (Ideally I'd want the shading completely off, but it still looks pretty cool)

    Combined with a color pass using PWToon, it might work out quite nicely.

     

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013

    Hrm. I might be better off sticking with PWToon for the majority of what I'm doing, but this looks cool.

    The problem is the workflow -- two separate files and renders, plus the first pass took almost 30 minutes to render... for a single character and outfit!

    I used PWEffect with Curvature (inverted) for both opacity and ambient color. It does look pretty cool, though, so I may use it for specific images as the mood strikes me.

     

    Dancer Drawn Experiment.jpg
    3000 x 1000 - 462K
  • mmitchell_houstonmmitchell_houston Posts: 2,484

    Fixed the link to the Golden Age image: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/70312/wip-golden-age-superheroes

    I also added another image to this thread (so scroll to the bottom): http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/64940/wip-opinions-sought-on-comic-style-illustration#latest

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    djigneo said:

    Thanks to @Mustakettu85's pointers, I figured out the Line color issue. Took a bit of fiddling... pretty much brute force, but I got it! You da man!

    Awesome =)

     

    timmins.william said:

    The Scripted 3Delight Outline tool is great, for Normal output... except facial features and similar end up really blobby and too thick

    Have you tried playing with the edge-related parameters and filter width? Also enabling that "distance fade" can help - lines will become thinner when farther away. But it will mean playing with params more... It's not exactly the most user-friendly script in the world, true.

    So I guess djigneo's upcoming one should be a much better choice eventually =)

  • djigneodjigneo Posts: 283
    Mustakettu85 said:
    djigneo said:

     

    So I guess djigneo's upcoming one should be a much better choice eventually =)

    Hah, speaking of that, I proved out the concept of getting the render script to support Shader camera parameters, and that was the last big feature. At this point it's just a bit of clean-up, then Beta testing!

  • Mustakettu85Mustakettu85 Posts: 2,933
    djigneo said:

    Hah, speaking of that, I proved out the concept of getting the render script to support Shader camera parameters, and that was the last big feature. At this point it's just a bit of clean-up, then Beta testing!

    Great news!

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,013
    edited January 2016

    Must: I'll try playing with the parameters. The problem is wanting the outline of the character overall to be thick but the details around the face thin, and I don't know if there's an easy way for the script to tell that.

     

    I'm also happy to see development continuing in the 3DL community -- I worried, coming back, that I'd be in a big echoing empty ruin... ;)

     

    Post edited by Oso3D on
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