I really like Iray sketchy shaders and, for me, Iray renders way faster.

That said, I'm finding myself returning to PWToon to get a reliable result. The key is getting very specific lighting so that filters will react the same way each time. And with Iray, getting even ambient light... is a HUGE pain.

In this image, I use PWToon and AoA lights to get:

Just outlines

Just colors (even, no AO light)

Shading (Distant + AO)

Also used LR9K to get some Main Camera lines because some of the helmet details tend to disappear (since they are primarily diffuse maps and it's hard to tease out the details just via bump)

I love the style of Moebius... trying to emulate it a bit, though I suspect I'm going to have to break down and start playing with PWToon again to do it right.

Here's a combination of Iray, LR9K, and a whole lot of filters.

Having trouble replicating the exact style I had above on other scenes (which seems par for the course with filter stuff), but I got a result I'm happy with here:

I ended up using PWToon to get the precise starting image I wanted, because the one issue I still run into NPR with Iray is 'even lighting.' 3DL ambient works much easier for this kind of look. (I MIGHT try Iray Sketchy again and blow out the lights, since the sketch effect isn't directly light-based)

Also used LineRender9000, again, to add some crucial fiddly lining.

Heh, great! PWToon is one of my favorite products. While I'm enjoying Iray Sketchy, there are still certain things that I can only easily do with PWToon still.

Head Wax: I love the look and style. ;)

Here's some experimentation with Iray Sketchy shaders.

I'm not entirely happy with how thin the lining gets around the axe and shield (forcing me to change the style a little); I suspect in more robust renders I'm going to have to take the time to do a LineRender9000 pass to firm up some of the outlines.

Thank you, I have been enjoying your renders immensely and appreciate how you have shared the different results - your image of the turtle on the rock worked in pwToon convinced me to buy it :)

Well, in my last post I had the LR9000 renderer set to not render lights or shadows. Also this issue has come up regardless of whether I was using 3DU's Toon Generations 3Delight shaders with complex lighting, or pwToon with one Direct Light. The only true pattern, as I have said before, is that out of all the figures i've tried this happens only with Genesis 3 Male, so all I can guess is that it must be related to G3M's mesh somehow.

I see, thanks. So only G3M not G3F? And not previous generation Genesis with HD morphs applied?

I said out of the ones I've tried, and I haven't tried every figure. :P

Well, in my last post I had the LR9000 renderer set to not render lights or shadows. Also this issue has come up regardless of whether I was using 3DU's Toon Generations 3Delight shaders with complex lighting, or pwToon with one Direct Light. The only true pattern, as I have said before, is that out of all the figures i've tried this happens only with Genesis 3 Male, so all I can guess is that it must be related to G3M's mesh somehow.

I see, thanks. So only G3M not G3F? And not previous generation Genesis with HD morphs applied?

Well, in my last post I had the LR9000 renderer set to not render lights or shadows. Also this issue has come up regardless of whether I was using 3DU's Toon Generations 3Delight shaders with complex lighting, or pwToon with one Direct Light. The only true pattern, as I have said before, is that out of all the figures i've tried this happens only with Genesis 3 Male, so all I can guess is that it must be related to G3M's mesh somehow.

Just figured i'd post an example of what you can do by plugging textures into the ColourID. Hopefully the images will be in the right order.

The first image is the Animated Male for Genesis 2 rendered with pwToon and LR9000. The lines were generated using an Edge Blend and my makeshift Normals cam, with minor postwork to remove some lines in the face. It looks fine, but the scar on his chest doesn't really "fit" the rest of the image.

The second image is a ColourID render with every surface set to white, and the chest scar texture plugged in.
EDIT: I've removed this, because the chest scar is from a Daz 3D product (LIE Wound Makeup Artist), and the way that it was rendered (on a white background mostly head on), well, it looked too similar to the unaltered texture, so i've removed that just in case.

The third image are the resulting outlines from the ColourID render with LR9000 (with line edge threshold set to 0.1).

And the fourth and final image shows it all put together. The chest scar now fits the style of the render much better.

I got an art gig (yay!) for upcoming RPG Galactic Dragons (wuxia + wild west + D&D in Spaaaace)

He wants a certain Chinese painting style, so I've been refining it. Some of the images use Linerender9k + PWToon, the others use Sketchy for Iray.

http://willbear.deviantart.com/gallery/62333720/GG

Again, one of the things I love about Linerender9k is that I can totally just set everything up in Iray and do a few linepasses anyway, in 3DL.

WILL! You da man! That is great news! What a cool idea for the art style. This is definitely different and it will stand out amidst all the other books I've seen (and as a game publisher, I've seen a lot).  I'm leaving a few comments over at DA on specific images, but in general I'm really impressed (as always) by what I see there. Please keep us posted (and if you respond to any of my comments through DA, you might want to PM me if I don't respond back in a while; I don't visit that site often).

I got an art gig (yay!) for upcoming RPG Galactic Dragons (wuxia + wild west + D&D in Spaaaace)

He wants a certain Chinese painting style, so I've been refining it. Some of the images use Linerender9k + PWToon, the others use Sketchy for Iray.

http://willbear.deviantart.com/gallery/62333720/GG

Congrats Will, and well-deserved. I absolutely love the look you've achieved, very well-done. In some of them, it's almost impossible to tell they started with 3D models.

-- Walt Sterdan 

I got an art gig (yay!) for upcoming RPG Galactic Dragons (wuxia + wild west + D&D in Spaaaace)

He wants a certain Chinese painting style, so I've been refining it. Some of the images use Linerender9k + PWToon, the others use Sketchy for Iray.

http://willbear.deviantart.com/gallery/62333720/GG

Again, one of the things I love about Linerender9k is that I can totally just set everything up in Iray and do a few linepasses anyway, in 3DL.

03 subfolder handles Diffuse outline modifiers.

The first series of presets (01) in the subfolder basically just darkens the diffuse color.

The second series (02) changes the edge weight, the next changes the contrast, then normal strength, and then some color stuff.

Most of the time I only play with 02 and 03. 02 makes the outlines higher weight, while 03 handles how far 'in' the shading goes. I usually go back and forth between these two values.

With special shading (crosshatch, etc), it can be helpful to play with the scale (in subfolder 05, Draw styles), to make it large enough so you see the effect when playing with it. Once you get it mostly how you want, you might want to slowly step down the scale until it looks appealing.

That is, I usually want larger scale, obvious stuff to dial into where I want it, then tighten everything up to look smoother.

 

Great summary and explanation, Will! Since I read previously that you think you'll basically switch over to IRay now even for toon style work, may I ask what approach you'll take to achieving similar diffuse effects as done with pwToon?

This is, btw, the death knell of my use of 3DL.

There are now a bunch of things that used to be signature 3DL-ism items, that now Iray can do and DOES WAY FASTER.

I mean, I've had PWToon and Linerender stuff that ends up taking 30-60 minutes, or more.

Hey, I have a question and I want to see if anyone else has encountered something similar.

I was re-doing one of my earlier Sketchy experiments. It's a G3M figure with 3Delight shaders that I hadn't converted to pwToon yet. I applied the "DTTS - Iray Toon Shader Base" shader preset in the "IrayToonShader" folder to a couple of Surfaces and then did a quick render to see. Instead of the Toon look, I got the shiny surfaces shown in the screen capture. What the what...?!?

I double-checked the Surfaces and they all had the right Sketchy parameters. What's going on?

Has anyone else run across this?

 

I think I had this issue when I first tried the program. What MIGHT work (I think this is how I fixed it), is to make sure all the surfaces have the Iray Uber base shader applied to them first, and then use the Sketchy shaders. I think the Sketchy shader was having a strange reaction to a particular type of shader that wasn't an Iray shader. Making sure all the surfaces are Iray surfaces first seemed to fix the issue.

That's a good idea. I'll try it out. Thanks! It might help explain the question I had earlier about the lights not affecting the Surfaces on the figure.

Hey, I have a question and I want to see if anyone else has encountered something similar.

I was re-doing one of my earlier Sketchy experiments. It's a G3M figure with 3Delight shaders that I hadn't converted to pwToon yet. I applied the "DTTS - Iray Toon Shader Base" shader preset in the "IrayToonShader" folder to a couple of Surfaces and then did a quick render to see. Instead of the Toon look, I got the shiny surfaces shown in the screen capture. What the what...?!?

I double-checked the Surfaces and they all had the right Sketchy parameters. What's going on?

Has anyone else run across this?

 

I think I had this issue when I first tried the program. What MIGHT work (I think this is how I fixed it), is to make sure all the surfaces have the Iray Uber base shader applied to them first, and then use the Sketchy shaders. I think the Sketchy shader was having a strange reaction to a particular type of shader that wasn't an Iray shader. Making sure all the surfaces are Iray surfaces first seemed to fix the issue.

Hey, I have a question and I want to see if anyone else has encountered something similar.

I was re-doing one of my earlier Sketchy experiments. It's a G3M figure with 3Delight shaders that I hadn't converted to pwToon yet. I applied the "DTTS - Iray Toon Shader Base" shader preset in the "IrayToonShader" folder to a couple of Surfaces and then did a quick render to see. Instead of the Toon look, I got the shiny surfaces shown in the screen capture. What the what...?!?

I double-checked the Surfaces and they all had the right Sketchy parameters. What's going on?

Has anyone else run across this?

After playing with Sketchy for a couple of days now, I have a couple of questions:

1) Do objects with Sketchy applied not respond to lights in the scene? I've been driving myself batty trying out different light sets. (I've found that some DS plug-ins don't work as well on the Mac so I've gotten a little paranoid...) One of the things I'd been looking forward to was using Sketchy with some of the emissive light sets for special effects and such. The picture below is one I just converted from pwToon.

2) Is there a way to alter the shading to change the sharpness from normal diffuse to diffuse shaded areas? That was a handy feature in pwToon because it allowed for different looks. I could simulate plastic or metal with a sharp transition, or skin and cloth with a smoother transition.

3) Sketchy offers some Specular controls, but I can't find any documentation on how to use them. Am I missing something somewhere? I'm not an Iray expert so I'm not sure how the Specular controls could be changed for different looks.

I'm having fun exploring Sketchy's capabilities. I'd been resisting going from 3Delight and pwToon to Iray because I prefer doing non-photorealistic rendering, but Sketchy's making me reconsider my life choices. 

Love this one.  It almost reminds me of The Incredibles.  :)

After playing with Sketchy for a couple of days now, I have a couple of questions:

1) Do objects with Sketchy applied not respond to lights in the scene? I've been driving myself batty trying out different light sets. (I've found that some DS plug-ins don't work as well on the Mac so I've gotten a little paranoid...) One of the things I'd been looking forward to was using Sketchy with some of the emissive light sets for special effects and such. The picture below is one I just converted from pwToon.

2) Is there a way to alter the shading to change the sharpness from normal diffuse to diffuse shaded areas? That was a handy feature in pwToon because it allowed for different looks. I could simulate plastic or metal with a sharp transition, or skin and cloth with a smoother transition.

3) Sketchy offers some Specular controls, but I can't find any documentation on how to use them. Am I missing something somewhere? I'm not an Iray expert so I'm not sure how the Specular controls could be changed for different looks.

I'm having fun exploring Sketchy's capabilities. I'd been resisting going from 3Delight and pwToon to Iray because I prefer doing non-photorealistic rendering, but Sketchy's making me reconsider my life choices. 

Hi, can I just chime in and ask what is the benefit of using IRAY - a photo realistic render engine - to produce NPR?

Wouldn't this be paradoxical?

I guess you've got Sketchy upon IRAY versus (for example) Visual Style Shaders, pwToon (etc?) upon 3Delight and at the end of the day who cares what engine it runs on so long as you like the feature set, render times, ease of use, purchase price, resource requirements etc etc?

But maybe I'm just being extremely stupid and missing an obvious reason?

Feel free to illuminate me oh no wait that's a stupid pun DELETE DELETE

I would say the two major selling points of Iray versus something like 3Delight in this regard would be render speed and working in conjunction with other Iray materials.  I have a top of the line CPU and it's never going to render 3Delight as fast as GPU power at the same price point renders Iray.

These toon effects are shader presets and can exist perfectly in the same scene as other Iray materials.  You can have a fully detailed photorealistic scene powered by Iray with a completely non photorealistic character without the need for postwork.  I usually leave things like the eye surface a water or glass like Iray Uber material to keep reflections around which is a simple use case, but I imagine there's a lot of unique ways multiple materials can be used in the same scene.  A toon character behind some frosted glass may look pretty interesting, or possibly and ice themed villian with refractive / SSS frost effects in his surroundings.  Any of these Iray shaders are going to rely on Iray's lighting calculations as well which means that even though something may be toon it's still going to be lit more naturally with things like real world accurate indirect lighting.

Ok - I totally get those are two good reasons, thanks !

I never made the transition to Iray yet since up until recently I had no decent GPU - but I'm building a setup as I write this with a semi decent NVIDIA card so we'll see... ;)