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Hey, Will!
You might consider some of the techniques I've been experimenting with:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/63257/advanced-editing-of-cel-shaded-textures
They renders are VERY fast - just use the STANDARD 3DL render engine but make sure Progressive Rendering is ON. And you don't have to emulate my "painted" style of cel-shading. In fact you may be able to get satisfactory results just by adding texture maps to the Visual Style Shaders. Of course, there's still the problem of how they respond to lighting; so if you use a lot of dramatic lighting effects it may not work. But then again, you may discover how to overcome what's been a limitation for me.
The main reason I suggest trying this approach is that I've always found the Toon Render and postwork filters to be... unsatisfactory. They seem to give "approximate" results and lack precise control of the output. Before warned, however, if you go the full blown filter customization of your actual texture maps, it WILL add a significant amount of time to pre-production. But then once you've obtained satisfactory results, you can render away and don't have to worry about postworking - at least to achieve a cel-shaded style. And again, if you just add the unmodified textures to the shaders, you will drastically cutdown on the pre-production process.
Anyway, I hope that's helpful even if it's just food for thought. Good luck! I hope you find a workflow that fits your project.
-Damon
aka HabitualGypsy
Ahh. Turns out there was an object that had had a 'bad shader' (probably from being converted back and forth too much). Replacing it with a fresh copy cleared up the problem.
And now all of a sudden a pwEffect I was using just... stopped working. Meh.
Which reminds me... does a graphics card impact 3DL rendering at all? If I end up doing this more, I might shift my specs for my next computer... (although I still like to do Iray, so an improvement there would be NICE...)
I am doing a webcomic as well. I am in the same boat as you. My schedule though is to put out 1 page a week, so I can afford to take about a day to do each panel (~6 panels per page = 6 days to do a single page, which is about on track).
I am nearing completion of the 2nd twenty-six page issue (I have only put out the first half of issue 1 yet, but I try to work like 1 issue ahead just to be safe). Issue 1, 26 pages, was done 100% in 3DeLight. Issue 2 has been done 100% in Iray. Here is what I have seen in the comparisons.
1. For actual live render speeds, of course, 3DL crushes Iray. I had an old scene that had to be re-rendered in 3DL just the other day, after spending since like June doing only Iray. I actually cracked up at how fast it rendered (like, 45 seconds to completion... it was a small scene with only 3 figures and a transparent BG).
2. For scene setup, where you are setting up characters and lights and then doing test renders, I feel that it is about a draw. 3DL renders the tests faster, of course, but with 3DL you need to set up a lot more lights and you have to be much more finnicky about where they go, how intense each light is, etc. This takes me many, many test renders to get right. With Iray, I can put a sun in the shot, or an HDRI, or a couple of mesh lights, in the obvious places, and that is all I need. I take much fewer test renders. So when it comes to 'getting it right' the total time taken is about equal, just doing different things: 3Dl rendering over and over while making tweaks to the lighting; Iray doing the final render after only a couple of tweaks.
3. For doing multiple shots of the same basic scene, i.e. from different camera angles during a 2-page conversation, Iray hands-down kicks 3Delight's ass all over the board. It is NO contest. In my first issue, literally for EVERY panel I had to re-do the lighting, because there is no natural bounce in 3DL, and what is a 'key light' from one angle becomes a 'back light' from the other. Trying to set it up so the shadows looked like they were coming from a sun at the same angle, while still lighting up faces and bodies in the camera view so the reader could see what the frack is going on, took hours of fiddling. Each and every panel had to be completely re-tweaked. In Iray, it might take a while to get the sun and sky lighting the way I want, but once it's there? I'm done. Works from every angle, every pose, all throughout the scene. So I have this long, something like 7 page dialogue scene in a hospital room between two characters. Took me a long time to set it up right. Once I did that, I just posed, rendered, changed camera angles, posed, rendered, changed camera angles, and NEVER had to touch the lights. Once or twice I had to slightly twiddle exposure, but that was it. I blew through those pages in way less than 7 weeks.
4. With the right shaders/mats, which they did not have when Iray first came out but are pretty well available now, Iray looks better than 3DL most of the time mat-wise... cloth looks more like cloth, leather more like leather, etc. Skin is still an issue but some of the preconfigured shaders are making that situation better.
In the end, after about 26 pages and thus something like 120+ rendered shots using each method, Iray is the clear winner for something like a comic-book, specifically because a comic-book is going to be multiple shots in the same basic scene, from different angles. The natural bounce and ambient and so forth of Iray means you don't have to keep re-freaking-doing the lights EVERY time you do a camera turn-around or a reverse angle. Once the lighting is right you can put your cameras just about anywhere and the scene will look good.
Overall in my experience the total time taken was no substantially different... I just spent the time in different ways. In 3DL, rendering is quick, but the setup and tweaking takes hours. In Iray, rendering takes hours but the setup and tweaking takes much less time over mutliple scenes. Yes, the FIRST shot will take nearly as long to setup as 3DL, but with 3DL, all subsquent shots take nearly as long to set up, whereas in Iray subsequent shots take time for posing only... lighting does not need to be changed much if at all. This also has the massive advantage of keeping the scene lighting consistent from panel to panel, so it doesn't look like you are going from sunrise on earth to sunset on Mars just because you did a camera turn-around.
But another key for me is WHAT takes time. It takes me about a week to do the rendering of a single page either way, about 1 day per panel. BUT... with 3DL, I will have to be *at* the keyboard for almost the entire time (it's not even worth the time to step away during a render). With Iray, most of the time the computer is churning, and I can't really use it for anything else ON the computer, but I can do something else productive somewhere else. If it's going to take me, say, 2 hours to do a scene, I'd rather it take 15 minutes to set up and 1:45 to render while I read a novel, than take 15 minutes to render, after I spend 1:45 doing setup/tweaking/testing.
Now... for individual shots, like single pieces of artwork where you use a scene only once and never again, there is not a clear advantage to Iray, unless you just like the look of it. But for scenes where you are doing multiple renders in the same setting, with just different poses and especially camera angles, zooms, etc, Iray, IMO, has very clear advantages over 3DL. At this point, there is pretty much no way I am going back to 3DL for my comic.
Steven, that is incredibly good advice about comic workflow! Especially about the advantage of Iray lighting.
A cheat I use on some scenes is to use a background prop with an image and then blur it slightly using DOF focussed on the main character/s. I can save a massive amout of render time by not crowding my scene with real geometry. And I can have backgrounds I could never put together in DS with real props/characters. Of course this method is not suitable for most scenes, but it's a handy trick. I'm currently trying out 180 degree hd panoramic photos applied to sem-circular background props, so the camera can be mover realistically around the character/s. Liberty Lass is very cool BTW.
The critical thing for me is that I'm not looking for realism in my comic, which is where the scales tip toward 3DL.
If I WAS, or even anything like it, I would be going for Iray. Good lighting in 3DL is a f'in nightmare.
However, toon-level lighting? MUCH more forgiving; one or two distant or points lights and you can call it a day, I think. When I WAS trying for a more realistic style, I eagerly went for Iray because it was such a pain in 3DL (meshlights, uberenvironment, etc)
Yes for toon or cel shading Iray is of no use.
I did a personal comic before iRay came to Daz, even for me that doing an iray render of a single scene would cost me just mere 2-3 minutes of rendering, I see ridiculous using it for a long project of images, and because not for rendering but the whole change of materials changed to iRay base shaders!!, and that is not a work for CUDA but manual tweaking!, that's why!
3DL is more suitable for that work, in my perspective.
I like your images of the lizard-alien. way cool. =-)
Even with a 6Gb GPU card you still would need a lot of simple PC generic Ram for GPU iRAy rendering (why?, dunno but it does on my super PC and no!, CPU is unchecked!),
it's a myth that having a beefy ram on gpu cards can do marvels on iray, you still needs a minimun of 8Gb of DDR3 for that.
Further to my comment above, here are some panels of a comic I'm working on with my daughter.
As mentioned above, I'm using a 180 degree curved background image plane that can be rotated to render panels from a number of viewpoints. I dont have to touch the light or the DOF settings, just rotate the background plane to give a different viewpoint. This has the advantage over flat backgrounds that can't be used for multiple renders from different angles. You need to use DOF to make the renders look reasonably acceptable. And you also need big high quality panoramic images for your background plane. These were rendered with Iray and took about 8 minutes each.
Edit - the original images were rendered at 1512 x 877
As I watch this cartoon style 3dl image take an hour+ to render, rethinking things a little. ;) (Ok, there are fog effects that I think are making it chug...)
Is progressive Rendering set to ON? Also, out of curiosity, what are the dimensions of the image?
-Damon
aka HabitualGypsy
I have done quite a few comics and still do create comics, I first started out using Poser then I moved to Daz Studio when I moved to Genesis 2. In all cases I use 3DL mainly because I know that I am going to run them through a photoshop filter to get the toon effect I am after I use Color Pen Sketch from the Art Actions product by Adam Wright it is good for what I want it for.. I used to use Manga Studio but moved to Comiclife 3 due to it having options that the latest version of Manga Studio left out..
When it comes to lights I use a few as possible but I do use Age of Armour's Advanced Distant, Spot and Ambient lights.. But on occasion I will use the point lights built into Studio, as for Iray for images for a comic that you are then going to use a filter on is not worth it.. The only time I have comics done using renderers like Iray, Octane, Luxrender and other similar renderers is for those comics that are one image per page, the main reason for that is you get to see the beauty of the full image and not just a small part of it if it is crammed into a panel..
But in all I have Iray and Luxrender but don't use them for doing comic panels because of the length of time they can take especially if you have 20, 40, 80 or more images to do..
if i were making a comic again, I would spend time making sure I had become an expert at reducing rendering times. Granted that water scene I did still took forever...but that is unavoidable. Some scenes will take a lot of time due to complexity (in pretty much any render engine). However for the type of scene you have most often, you should get those render times down as much as possible before you get too far along. Will save you time later.
It may not sound fun, but once you have a few tricks up your sleeve it would be worth the time.
Yeah, I'm thinking I might be better served by honing down Iray scenes.
OT: Great renders, but with image 6, the girl rushing into the scene? Her hand pose kind of destroys the dynamic. She obviously wants to stop the other girl from pushing the boy, but the hand pose doesn't match. Maybe a reaching out pose would be better, and also make the action of the girl pushing the boy more visible?
Yep, still tinkering.
One issue I'm running into is that my 3DL renders keep being almost the same length as Iray renders, which removes one of the big reasons I'm bothering. I DO like the clean lines with dzToon, but I find the workflow for Iray faster, and if I'm smart about lighting and shading I can get nice lines with filters.
So I'm going back to some earlier problematic renders and looking at mistakes I may have made.
With a bunch of tweaks to an Iray render (reducing or eliminating translucence/SSS over simple transparency, reducing SubD and displacement as much as possible), on one test I'm seeing a render 100x as fast. Aaah.
And since the comic is fairly small in size (800 width x variable height), a lot of the subtle details that those things highlight just... aren't visible.
So, in short, I THINK I might stay with Iray and focus on learning to manage my workflow a lot better and keep in mind the distinction between comic work and larger/detailed portraits/landscapes.