pwToon
Ron Knights
Posts: 2,113
in The Commons
I've wanted this product for several years. I finally bought it. How do I get it to work. I loaded a character, and clicked on it, and clicked on the pw shader. Nothing happened. Am I missing something?
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Ron, I struggled with pwToon until I followed this tutorial I found at Deviantart. I'm still learning, but this was really helpful to get me started. I downloaded the suggested additional files from sharecg.
https://www.deviantart.com/cyonixgfx/art/Cel-Shading-in-DAZ-Studio-156161543
MollyTabby, thanks for the effort. However, that page appears to be woefully outdated. Some of the files mentioned are no longer available. It appears that someone was doing new tutorials, and would no longer keep the info on that site.
I don't know how much you know about this, I hope I'm not just going over the obvious.
The toon effect does not show up in the preview. It does show up in an ipr render but if you don't use this you won't see it until the render.
This is a shader that you have to apply to surfaces, not entire figures. Select your figure or prop, select the surfaces you want in the surfces tab and apply the shader.
It doesn't work at all in Iray so make sure your render settings are set to 3Delight.
Good luck, I hope you have fun.
There isn't much about I'm afraid Ron. I really struggled to find anything which explained how to use them. I've just done another search because I was sure I'd found presets through the forum. Here is the link to the thread for the freebie set proved by Crescent. I select a surface, click on the pwToon shader to set the surface up and then apply these shaders to get the colours I want. I'm probably doing it all wrong though!
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/195231/new-pwtoon-cel-shader-presets#latest
I went back to my original link and the person who put up the tutorial also put up a later one (which is still a few years old)
https://www.deviantart.com/cyonixgfx/art/pwToon-Tutorial-1-The-Basics-257226861
Hopefully someone will be along soon who know how to use them much better than I do!
Mollytabby & Peter Wade, thanks for your input. I've decided to ask for a refund.
Wait! Don't give up yet! pwToon is really an excellent program. If you check my signature, you can see a bunch of the work I've done with it. It's my preferred toon shader for DS.
I can offer some help is you're still interested.
Amazing work @SphinxMagoo
Thanks for your responses. Unfortunately it appears pwToon is not as simple to use as the product description describes. I've moved on.
Actually it is pretty simple to use.
Like any shader you need to have the figure selected in the scene tab and the surface selected in the surfaces tab.
Then double click the PWtoon shader icon the you can choose one of the presets or change the surface parameters yourself, you don't see much of a result in viewport the lines etc only show when rendered.
PWToon does not work with Iray only 3dl
Not bad. How much post work do you do? I've been thinking of getting this for a long time but never pulled the trigger.
Quick question just to be sure - are you rendering in Iray or 3DL?
The tutorials are very much relevant still. Don't get so hung up on the textures.
You should get Crecent's Cel Shader Presets
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/195231/new-pwtoon-cel-shader-presets
Just make sure you are not using PBR (photoreal textures) textures with pwToon. Or do as I do and remove all the textures and just change colors in the diffuse channel after you apply Crecent's presets to get the toon colors you want.
If you must use a texture because of some detailing, it is best to transform them into a black and white image for use with pwToon, or any toon shaders for that matter. You can then change the colors in the parameters to whatever you like. I have even used Xurge 3D's bump maps in the diffuse channel to bring out some great toon details.
Here's sample of a Ghost AR (Sedition Soldier) where I converted the textures to black and white and Xurge 3D's Enforcer 01 Armor for Vicky 4 where I used the bump map in the diffuse channel.
I applied the same techniques to the hair which is why you see such detailed lines.
I love that image @nDelphi and thank you for the really helpful advice. I really want to get to the standard you’ve achieved.
That Ghost AR soldier looks pretty damn good. Vicky looks good too but I'm not sure about the face. Man I don't know whether to stick with VSS or get PwToon. I wish I wasn't so indecisive. I hate to waist money on a product. Thanks for that tip BTW. I never thought of that. I'm going to try it with Visual Style Shaders.
The face is just the shadow from the sun light source above. That too can be controlled with pwToon's upper bound and lower bound settings, part of the shader, or move the light source around to make shadows less prominent, like you would with any other render.
It looks impressive, Did you do any post work or is that a raw render?
I like Visual Style Shaders a lot, but the biggest problem I have with it, is you have to type the settings you want manually into every surface. No bit deal in a small scene. The more models you use, the bigger a pain it becomes. I think there is a way to have a preset but I never learned how. Also, I'm still not 100% satisfied with the setting I chose and that took a lot of experimenting.
If anyone is interested here are the online docs with live scripts that I saved in .MHT format for offline viewing. You can use these to help you understand the pwToon settings, just use the sliders to see how they affect the shader. Each section also has tabs, so navigate to them to see additional settings. Don't click on any of the links to the left as they go directly to the website which is no longer online.
The PoseWorks' website seems to have disappeared so these come in handy to me and I am sure to anyone who has the pwToon shaders.
They only work with Internet Explorer as far as I can tell. Just drag and drop them into a tab.
They can be found at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f79QtBC3kZVxuIiUMWaLmqQbqRicOrLF/view
Those are raw renders.
Toon rendering is a lot of work because we don't get out of the box materials ready to go. We have to tweak every single object we throw at the scene, even with toon presets.
It looks great for a raw render. If you don't mind, I would like to play with that image in photoshop and my other tools to see how well it would work with my standard procedures. It will help me decide whether or not to pick PwToon up.
Knock yousefl out. :) Post if you like what you do with them here.
Some quick experiments
Cool effects.
Thanks for letting me use your image. Very helpful.
I received a response from the Help Desk. They offered to help with some tech support. I'm not ready for that right now. In the meantime, I've decided to keep pwToon.
A lot of us own it and have never used it. When you are ready start a thread and a lot of folks will join in. Just teh response and the number of views here show that.
BTW, I used Photoshop, the Nix Collection, and Topaz Studio to enhance that image. Photoshop is the only program that costs. I pay the lowest sub fee they have which is just below $10 per month.
Thanks!
For the past two years, I've been doing as little post as possible. Not because I'm against it, but because I still can't get super-comfortable with GIMP.
pwToon's nice to use. It gives me the comic and animation look I want. One trick I learned was to utilize the effects provided with the package, but stripping out any changes to colors or maps. It helps vary up the materials so that, say, skin renders differently from cloth and metal.
pwToon's in 3DL. If I have Iray elements, I use sickleyield's Iray to 3DL converter to help make things easier to apply the pwToon shader to them.
I can't remember if I mentioned this before. I'm using 3DL because it's easier for my iMac to handle.