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The scene is using Filament as its drawstyle?
Yes
Double checked the render engine and that seemed to have solved the issue with props in the room. The sofa, 2 chairs, coffee table and floor worked fine. When I went to apply the Vicky 9 shader to Genesis 9, this is what I got. I undid and tried just Mikey 9, same result. Undid again and applied just generic filatoon skin shader, same result. I only have 2 spotlights in the room set as raytraced shadows.
Spotlights in confined spaces can be problematic because of the nature of light and how it falls away (inversed to the distance squared) basically each doubling of the distance will require 4x the light, each halving of the distance will require 0.25x the light.
in your scene the spotlight is too close (bleaching out all the colour) you can already see the colour returning to the parts furthest from the spotlight.... decrease the intensity, luminous flux , increase the spread angle and (or) move it further away, then play with shadow threshold and smoothness of the character in the surface tab.
Also increasing the environment weight in the surfaces tab may help.
I think you're right, as I'm seeing a little bit of flesh tone on the very ends of his feet where there is enough falloff from the light to be present. I think you've probably figured it out, that the light is far too bright -that would be my guess too, anyway.
All good suggestions. But what it took was adding in the filament options set from the Genesis 9 toon directory to fix things. Also for some reason when I applied Micky 9 and Vicky 9 a toon outline wasn't added. Once I added a toon outline and then reapplied the material file, everything worked. Now I just need to go back and get my drop shadows back.
Make sure your lights have shadows enabled.
They are enabled. And then as soon as I add the filaments set they seem to disappear. Does adding the set change the settings on spotlights? I know it only adds a distance light but doesn't set it's shadow property. Or at least in my case it's not.
It's actually the distant light that was added that filled in the shadows... always good to have the filament draw options available though.
It does seem that like once the distant light was removed and then only adding in the filament options from the set that the shadows returned. I added a few more spotlights to try and spread the light around. Eventually added the distant light back in but at a reduced intensity so it wouldn't wash out the shadows. Also played with environment weight on several items so they weren't so dark. At least now I know of some settings to play with when the shader does something weird or doesn't behave as expected.
it doesn't change the settings on the spotlight but you will have to change the shadow type on the newly added distant light from none to any of the two other options (that if you want the distant light to cast a shadow also).
It was very easy to recreate your problem... literally load a figure, look at it from above, load in a spotlight to that viewpoint and increase the lumens of that spotlight to the point where only the feet were showing slight colour.
There are some odd characteristics that need to be understood (Vicky's eyebrows are one odd characteristic i'm trying to workout) in asking questions you learn and the people working on the solution learn too, i know i did here.
My first attempts playing around with filatoon.
As far as I can tell, Filament only "reads" one distant light (whichever one is highest up on the list in the Scene Tab) and if it's set to "Shadows >> None" it can override shadows cast by other lights. So that might be what's causing the issues. That's just a guess of course since I can't see your scene tab.
i'm glad i've been following this thread from the start... just little nuggets of knowledge that accumulate and stick in the mind over time.
Can someone explain the custom LUTs to me? That's one thing I haven't really played with yet.
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-lut/
Essentially a LUT lets you change the colours in a systematic way for various effects.
My understanding of LUTs is colour grading (as in Richard's link) but how that relates to Filatoon LUT presets is unclear... in fact, from my current understanding there seems to be no relationship at all. (i'm hoping your question will change that).
From what i can tell these LUTs give us four options on how the transition from light to dark is rendered, either light to dark with no transition, an intermediate mid tone step and two options where the intermediate step has a small gradient. i can't glean any more than that at the moment.
Having these presets would allow a consistent and uniform transition if used on all elements in a scene (which could be useful) but not sure how that falls within my understanding of a LUT.
Edit: Ripped this from Mada's first post (it doesn't help me at the moment but it's the only official explanation we have)...
LUT presets
Color grading and shading transitions presets
Specular and Shadow use the same LUT map.
Different offsets will sample different parts of the image.
Divide the image in half vertically and put the shadow in the lower half, specular in the upper.
A value of 0.25 for shadow and 0.75 for specular gives you some pixel buffer.
2nd Edit: i still wouldn't understand it but wouldn't changing the words image to surface and vertically to horizontally make more sense?
That was my understanding as well.
Artini Thank you!
SolitarySandpiper and Artini, you're welcome! Glad the explanation was useful.
Dartanbeck I can totally see the benefit of working in layers as you do and then do color grading in Resolve/Fusion. Working in layers and applying fx/color grading to them separately can open up so many possibilies!
I've been meaning to use Resolve, especially for its color grading abilities, but I've chickened out twice now to return to what I usually go with for video editing (simple, but I know my way around). I just have to bite the bullet and follow some Resolve tutorials and practice!
For some of my projects, especially in Iray, it made a lot of sense to get DAZ to do as much up front. For example, BW in Iray has the added benefit of being so much faster to render than color, that I cut down a lot of time rendering BW directly. Filament's fast. The one big benefit here of rendering directly in BW for a BW project is getting the tonal relationships right in one go. It's harder for me to do that in color.
My next FilaToon experiment was to try and get a saturated watercolor kinda feel right in DAZ. I tweaked the Filament Draw Settings heavily and added some watercolor textures in the scene. I really want to see what's possible and close enough to what a style might evoke, so I can mimize postwork. Especially when animating, that would speed things up a lot. This was just a quick test, no postwork except for the watermark. I'm happy with the possibilities.
Hi yes I wrote that in the beginning when we started to experiment, and its looks like its now horizontal images, will double check in a bit.
Some fun things to play around with - change the black and white to a colour ie red and blue - you can get some very interesting effects. Adding a LUT map will override the shadow and specular threshold dials.
Hi Mada, thank you for that first post, it's helped so much in my understanding of the Filatoon presets.
May i just ask you for clarification on what you mean by "change the black and white to a colour ie red and blue"
is it any of the following two examples or is it something else?
Thank you.
Swapping a custom greyscale LUT for a custom colour LUT.
Or just changing the base colour and ambient colour
yes a custom LUT texture map. :) First image.
Here are a couple of LUT tests. The images show the strip of "color" I made and saved as a PNG that I put into the LUT slot. Under that the settings I used.
Thanks for the clarification.
They are really useful examples of the custom LUT maps in action... Thank you.
3Diva Thank you for those great examples!
I'm going to have to try out some custom LUTs.
I think I'm getting there. I'm liking the results I'm getting finally.
I have a question I'm pretty sure I know the answer too but it makes absolutely no sense to apply Filatoons shaders to strand based/dForce hair does it as all the detail in the strands of hair runs contrary to the artistic style of Filatoons shaders.