Something less photo-real wishlist?
davorama_9f606bd07d
Posts: 50
I know that there are a few shader products that require you to apply a shader to things in your scene to help get a toon or cell shaded effect on renderings, but is there any discussion about Daz Studio having a native render engine or post rendering effects to add edges to the meshes automatically? For example, Poser 11+ has toon outline options in the firefly render settings which will render a scene normally, then add the edges afterward. Shaders are nice and all for a very small scene, but if you have a large scene, adding a toon shader to everything in the scene is very combersome. There are a lot of graphic novel illustrators that use DS and Poser and the trend for Photo-real renderings kind of puts a damper on the "graphic novel" aspect of it, photo-real isn't for everybody.
Forgive me if this is already covered, I'm new to DS and haven't covered all it's bases yet.
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Comments
This is already possible in 3Delight, using the Toon mode and the Default Daz Shader.
Being new to this, I'm assuming by Toon Mode you mean the preview window "Cartoon Shaded" and rendering with the 3Delight render engine. I'm lost on the "default Daz Shader" and any other steps I have to take to set it up.
No, 3D elight has a Toon option in Render Settings. The Daz Default Shader is the olde, originale shader* that was in Daz Studio ab initio - it is assigned to newly created/imported objects when 3Delight is the active render engine, to assign it to an item that already has Daz Studio materials you'd need to save a shader preset from an item that used it.
* Actually it is a set of shaders - it has a Lighting Model option which switches between them, and the Toon mode toggles each between regualr and toon version - that's why it works only for that particular shader.
I can't find any TOON options in the render settings for 3Delight. Where is that specifically located? I'm running DS 4.2. Also, do you need to apply "shaders" to materials for this to work? This is what I was trying to avoid. Poser didn't require that.
Well, you could use Shader Mixer directly. Poser didn't have shaders as such, it used a different model (though essentially Material Room settimgs are shaders, and an MT5 is the functional equivalent of a Shader Preset).
davorama_9f606bd07d,
Is this the kind of outcome you had in mind, something NPR but not toon or cartoony at all? I used Sketchy here. There is an active Non Photorealistic Render thread where people showcase various techniques in situ Daz or by means of post-effects. Lately Sketchy seems to be getting the lion's share of attention in that thread.
I myself export my Daz scenes to Blender where I apply cel shading materials. There are number of good NPR shaders for Blender out there, commercial or otherwise. (Blender's Freestyle automatically applies outlines wholesale on renders, by the way.) As you pointed out, however, for small scenes its handy, but for larger ones the process becomes cumbersome. So far I've resorted to building a stock library of cel shaded materials. Needless to say, the going is slow. You can gauge my work through the links in my signature below.
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
That's very nice CSAA,
This is what my process is, for Poser, I know it's never a "one click make art" process, but in Poser with the firefly toon edge option, you don't have to assign special material shaders to anything to get the toon edges in the firefly render options, it's just "do you want the toon edges or not cuz I'm going to apply them to everything in the scene". This saves a LOT of time without having to manipulate any materials on any figures. There might be a bit of confusion about Posers toon rendering. There is some options for display (what you see in your preview window, you can set some settings to simulate a toon cell shading effect with or without color, actually you can adjust the amount, and you can also adjust the thickness of edges. However these features do not like transparent materials very well and you have to adjust some materials like transmapped hair, eye lashes,etc. That is too cumbersum.) The firefly render settings "toon outline" allows pen, pencil, marker styles and allows some control over thickness. This is applied to what is detected in the scene as a edge and these edges are added after the render is finished, automatically, this does not affect any materials at all. There is some artifacts, as you can see by my supplied image, but the post process overlay in a paint program lets me get rid of all of those quickly with brush strokes in affected areas, much faster process than trying to manipulate tons of materials in DS or Poser. When you work on graphic art novels or comics, you are always pulling in content, props, figures on the fly, no two scenes are alike, so not having to manipulate materials is a must have in my book.
DS has 3Delight and Iray, both require a different set of material adjustments (if I am correct, remember, I'm a noobe to DS), this is way cumbersom and most figures and props are supplied in Iray for the most part. Dumbing down to 3Delight leaves a mess when it comes to bump mapping, its far more extreme in 3Delight than Iray. My whole point of commenting about Non-photoreal rendering options for DS is to avoid all the material manipulations and have the non-photoreal options built into the render engine itself. Just something to think about.
davorama_9f606bd07d,
I never used Poser. From the onset I wanted to create graphic novels using Daz iRay. It sounds like the person who's shared your journey (and probably your pain) is juvesatriani. He's used Poser before, then tackled the 3DS challenge; finally he came up with is own post-processing methods using Photoshop. He's shared his work in the NPR thread I referenced.
Where I'm from, manga or manhuwa is a popular form of graphic storytelling. It helps that most illustrations here are in black and white. The requirements for graphics production isn't as complicated as it is with colored pieces. The closest I got to producing manga-like comics via this Holy Grail of yours using Poser/Firefly -- meaning, one click, no fussing with shaders and materials -- is to use Clip Studio Paint.
Below are a few comic panels I made over a year ago as a proof of concept that this worked. These are all Daz renders -- photorealistic iRay using materials that came with Daz assets w/o any alterations -- saved as JPG, then imported into CSP. The "convert to lines and tones" function in CSP took care of the edge detection, the tones and some amount of hatching. I spent most of my time creating images in Daz according to my script, if I recall correctly; there was only a little overhead fiddling with CSP knobs and sliders. (I didn't have a lot Daz assets then, so I relied mostly on stock CSP images for background.) As a Clip Studio Paint newbie back then, I had lots of fun with that project!
Since then I've set my sights on a cel shading aesthetic. Hence I introduced Blender into my workflow. It's still within the ambit of manga-esque graphic arts; that's why I'm motivated to put in the effort playing with NPR shaders.
Cheers!
There is a simple, but versitile free toon shader that comes with Daz|Studio,
I've used it for years, and achieve resutls like this with it.