I have pwtoon, linerender9000, my free art shaders, and now sketchy.

Rendering in Iray, with good nvidia graphics cards, is often way faster for me.

My Iray art renders rarely take more than 5 minutes, while most of my large art renders in 3dl sometimes take an hour or more.

 

In your opinion, is it worth buying any of the toon characters or do you just use the tools you mentioned?  For example, Stylized Matt Figure and Hair for Genesis 3 Male(s) and Stylized Megan Character and Hair for Genesis 3 Female(s) are on sale right now.  I only have Visual Style Shaders and I’m still on the fence about Sketchy. 

Here's my first go at a Sketchy character and render.

It took some playing around for me. Even with the video, some of the options are still a bit confusing. I wanted to experiment with the faux-rim light that's such a staple of superhero costumes. I still have to play with this character (those Toon Eyebrows don't match up with the G3M skin texture!), but I wanted to offer a sample for people who are still undecided. As a longtime fan of pwToon, it took me a long time to get the software to do what I'm happy with. Sketchy sure is promising!

That's more consistent with the look I'm going for.  UGH, I spend a lot of $$ on this hobby and I just started a few months ago LOL!.

It's quite the expensive hobby! I don't think I'm the only person on these forums who's said that they've spent more money on their digital clothes than on real world clothes.

I have pwtoon, linerender9000, my free art shaders, and now sketchy.

Rendering in Iray, with good nvidia graphics cards, is often way faster for me.

My Iray art renders rarely take more than 5 minutes, while most of my large art renders in 3dl sometimes take an hour or more.

Here's my first go at a Sketchy character and render.

It took some playing around for me. Even with the video, some of the options are still a bit confusing. I wanted to experiment with the faux-rim light that's such a staple of superhero costumes. I still have to play with this character (those Toon Eyebrows don't match up with the G3M skin texture!), but I wanted to offer a sample for people who are still undecided. As a longtime fan of pwToon, it took me a long time to get the software to do what I'm happy with. Sketchy sure is promising!

That's more consistent with the look I'm going for.  UGH, I spend a lot of $$ on this hobby and I just started a few months ago LOL!.

Don't worry, you'll get more stuff for your money later. At the beginning stages, there are stuff you have to get in order to do whatever it is you want to do. You can't get around that. But later you don't NEED stuff that badly, you can wait for a good sale. With that said, Sketchy was one of the few products that I bought immediately when it came out. :)

Here's my first go at a Sketchy character and render.

It took some playing around for me. Even with the video, some of the options are still a bit confusing. I wanted to experiment with the faux-rim light that's such a staple of superhero costumes. I still have to play with this character (those Toon Eyebrows don't match up with the G3M skin texture!), but I wanted to offer a sample for people who are still undecided. As a longtime fan of pwToon, it took me a long time to get the software to do what I'm happy with. Sketchy sure is promising!

That's more consistent with the look I'm going for.  UGH, I spend a lot of $$ on this hobby and I just started a few months ago LOL!.

Here's my first go at a Sketchy character and render.

It took some playing around for me. Even with the video, some of the options are still a bit confusing. I wanted to experiment with the faux-rim light that's such a staple of superhero costumes. I still have to play with this character (those Toon Eyebrows don't match up with the G3M skin texture!), but I wanted to offer a sample for people who are still undecided. As a longtime fan of pwToon, it took me a long time to get the software to do what I'm happy with. Sketchy sure is promising!

Hi folks,

I'm new to DAZ and to NPR. I was planning to export DAZ characters to Blender for rendering but apparently the "HD morphs" I'm using are difficult to export. So, I'm starting to look into 3Delight more seriously. The work on this thread is simply amazing! Could anyone recommend some sources of information to better understand how to achieve some of these effects? Is there a public shader library available to experiment with and dissect? I purchased the PWtoon shader which has many options and seems promising but I'm not sure what is going on under the hood. The 3Delight manuals on the DNA site are specific to Maya and other applications (not DAZ)--but I assume they are still relevant? Generally, I'm finding DAZ documentation a little sparse.

Hi!

There is no DS-ready public shader library, but there is a number of generic RSL toon shaders that are fairly neat. You can find some in the Mosaic distro: https://github.com/aqsis/RIBMosaic - the plugin itself doesn't seem to work anymore sadly, but the .sl files are okay =)

Then there is this shader: http://swinproductions.com/Toon.html

They work okay in 3Delight. To get these into DS you will need to use the Shader Builder plugin. In my signature there is a link to the 3Delight Laboratory thread where we will gladly help you (and I also have a number of tutorials online, but it's best not to derail this thread with technical stuff - so please welcome to the lab =))

Then there is this product which will help you get shader-independent outlines - it uses the 3Delight built-in "inker" that you may have seen referenced in the docs on the DNA site:

www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/116791/linerender9000-commercial/p1

It also comes with a number of toon cameras that give interesting effects.

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.

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

As more and more people discover 3D art, less and less will be familiar with 3Delight. Personally I've only used 3Delight one time. And it was a headache to try and figure out - the lighting and all was such a pain in the bottom, imo. Where as with Iray, I can load up a good HDRI and have nice lighting with no fuss no muss. To me, hand cuffing people who may want to create toon style renders to an older render engine that they may not be familiar with is kind of silly. I, for one, am extremely happy with Sketchy and am very very glad that it's for Iray. :)

Besides, there are already quite a few toon-style programs available for 3Delight - there wasn't, until now, a single option in the Daz store for people who don't use 3Delight. It's great that Iray users now have an option. 

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

In 3DL with PWToon I often find myself doing a 'line pass' and a 'color pass' and then compositing, so I can blur and adjust how the two combine. Or to play around with the colors without having to worry about the effect on the outlines.

While you can do a lot with Sketchy (as far as I can tell so far) straight, it might still be useful to do this, particularly if you are using color maps mostly as-is. If you can replace a skin texture with, say, a simple one tone color, then great, but like with my Karban image I found it hard to 'flatten' the colors to make them look more 'toonish' while still doing stuff with the Sketchy lines, and if I had to do it again I'd probably do it as two separate passes.

Seem about as fast as any other shader, really.

Heck, I'm finding it faster than PWToon in several scenarios.

One issue I'm having a little trouble with is trying to get lines and detail inside (noses, etc) while not having really thick outlines.

Hi folks,

I'm new to DAZ and to NPR. I was planning to export DAZ characters to Blender for rendering but apparently the "HD morphs" I'm using are difficult to export. So, I'm starting to look into 3Delight more seriously. The work on this thread is simply amazing! Could anyone recommend some sources of information to better understand how to achieve some of these effects? Is there a public shader library available to experiment with and dissect? I purchased the PWtoon shader which has many options and seems promising but I'm not sure what is going on under the hood. The 3Delight manuals on the DNA site are specific to Maya and other applications (not DAZ)--but I assume they are still relevant? Generally, I'm finding DAZ documentation a little sparse.

-d. vyd

Hi folks. I am creating my first character in DAZ for a comic book--a male detective in his 60s. I've used the following products:

     Genesis 3 male base

     Aging morphs 3

     Miles hair

     9 to 5 outfit

     PWtoon shader

A render is attached. I'm hoping some people on the forum may be able to offer advice about the following difficulties I'm having:

1. PWtoon works with 3Delight and the results are very different from what I see in the viewport, making it nearly impossible to tweak parameters without a full render. Sometimes even skin pops through clothing in 3Delight but looks fine in the viewport. Is there a way to correct the discrepancy?

2. There is skin popping through clothing (pants & shoulder), which I hoped could be fixed automatically by setting some collision settings and trying autofit again--but that does not work. I've adjusted sliders associated with the shirt and pants and made tiny shifts in translation--but the whole process seems time consuming and full of trial and error--is there a better way? 

3.  To make his eyebrows gray and lips less red--do I need to edit the texture map directly?

4. I'm trying to keep some detail with PWtoon, especially in the face and hands. But, the results look very poor in some places and at some angles. Right now his neck looks horrible. Can anyone explain why and suggest a fix?

5. I'm having difficulty finding ready-made clothing that would be appropriate for this character--an older cut of sports jacket and pleated pants for instance. Could anyone recommend a source or particular products? I have very basic modeling ability in Blender--is it worth learning to model clothing?

Thank you,

D. Vyd

For what it's worth, I wound up using PWToon Shaders instead. They blend the color you provide them with the color of the light, and you can just select all services and select a shadow color to provide a consistant looking shadow.

There are some free cel-style shaders on share-cg.com (search ACDZ and crescent), and the DAZ default shaders presets include some toon-style presets (DZtoon...). There are also some great DAZ store products: visual-style shaders, manga-style shaders, and skunkville noir shaders may be useful in seeing what can be done, and possibly looking at their shader make-up in the shader-builder tools. You've found pwtoon, which is infinite in capabilities. There's also a line-render (lr9000) and the toonycam-pro products which take a different approach to toon-ing via the DAZ camera (visual-style has some line/edge coolness too), and there are some good line-edge effects using the geo-shell technique - look for the Manga-Sytyle thread for a great free geo-shell material, tuned for toons...

and over at rendo are some post-work photoshop actions that toon-ize traditional renders after the fact.

As far as learning how, I think there are some very informative threads in the technical forum, or others may be able to help you there. (yes, forum search sucks!)

Lastly, Will Timmons and Spearcarrier (I think) have some iray shaders over at share-cg that include some shaders that can be made to do some cool toon-ish stuff, as well as a recent toon-hair product in the DAZ store that came out a few weeks back. Will Timmons is one of the most generous folks out there, and would help you with any information you needed over in his freebies thread in the freebies forum.

cheers,

--ms

pwToon doesn't hae an underlying network - all of the pwShaders, and most if not all of the omnifreaker shaders, were written directly as RSL code. There should be a link to an online guide as I recall in with the shader presets.

Hello,

I am new to DAZ and interested in learning more about cel (e.g. comic book & cartoon) shading using 3Delight. I notice that 3Delight does not offer a manual specific to DAZ. Does DAZ provide such documentation? If not, is there another source of information?

I've purchased the PWtoon shaders from the DAZ store and found them to be useful and interesting. Is there a way to learn exactly what these shaders are doing--to see the underlying node network?

Thank you,

-d. vyd

A shader like pwToon will not usually show in preview, you do have to render (in 3Delight) to see the effect.

Last question... Do you know if you press the render button to get it to render or what am I doing incorrectly? I press the pwtoon various choices but do not see anyting in real time or other.