I have no idea what the base/blank shader is? I click on a surface, and double click the VSShader in the Content Pane...it applies.

Anyway, glad pwToon worked for you. I used it a while back, and I liked it.

3doutlaw said:

nDelphi said:

Can you give me some idea on your settings and lighting? I am trying out the Cowboy Gumdrops outfit and it isn't coming out like I would like. I see too much of something ( shadows, occlusion maybe) something is not making it look right.

A lot of times these shaders look good (and fast) with no lighting at all. Otherwise I almost always use a single distant light.

Hi,

My problem was that I was using the presets, I went with the base. Or whatever that is called (the blank shader) and worked my way into a working render. In the end I decided to use pwToon with the presets by Crescent.

nDelphi said:

I like the black and white images. They seem to be unique. I am working on graphic novels, mainly stuck on the writing and I have dabbled a lot with shaders. In the end I decided to stick with pwToon, mainly because it will mean a lot less work for me when it comes time to render the frames. It will still be time consuming, but not as much as with the other shaders.

Takeo.Kensei is correct in that shadows make a big difference and even character expressions too me is the biggest issue. I will have to get creative in Photoshop to add lines by hand to bring out the expressions in my characters.

Here's a thread I started about shadows not showing up in pwToon, turns out it was user error. :)

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/642993/

I use pwToon as well, it's a great tool. I have to fiddle with some of the line adjustments to get them thicker but it looks good in black and white.

A few years back I had a lot of trouble with the cartoon look in Poser, and found a solution that I still use with DAZ 3D. I wrote a tutorial for it.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=2139

For DAZ 3D, I use still UberEnvironment2 for this trick with Ambient (No Ray Tracing) Environment Mode.

I like the black and white images. They seem to be unique. I am working on graphic novels, mainly stuck on the writing and I have dabbled a lot with shaders. In the end I decided to stick with pwToon, mainly because it will mean a lot less work for me when it comes time to render the frames. It will still be time consuming, but not as much as with the other shaders.

Takeo.Kensei is correct in that shadows make a big difference and even character expressions too me is the biggest issue. I will have to get creative in Photoshop to add lines by hand to bring out the expressions in my characters.

Here's a thread I started about shadows not showing up in pwToon, turns out it was user error. :)

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/642993/

HeraldOfFire said:

I would always recommend using raytracing when you can. The speed difference is negligible, and in many cases, raytracing is actually faster too. Raytracing also gives more accurate results so it's an all-round winner.

Yep, I always use raytraced shadows. The sunlight I was using came with the Blue Planet - Orbital View product. It is set to use deep shadow maps. Also, the shadows were set to 10% softness. Well, in space on the ship that softness doesn't look real, the shadows should be harder, so I changed that too.

I applied pwToon to the planet's ground and clouds. If you've seen Planetes I think the planet rendered very similar. Maybe rendering the planet separately and giving it a Gaussian blur will make it glow similar to the glow they give it in Planetes.

nDelphi said:

After many attempts for creating a look for a graphic novel with several toon shaders I decided that pwToon with the Crescent's pwToon Cel Shader Presets will just be the easiest as I have to do a lot less tweaking for scenes and props as well.

I did however noticed that pwToon doesn't cast an object's shadow? Is this correct or am I missing something?

I also want to ask those who work with toon renders, how best to create a night scene with pwToon. I noticed that I can't do that by just lowering the lights. I think only by changing the diffuse and shading colors to get darker colors, am I correct?

Below are a few examples of where I think shadows should be rendered, below the jets and the jet taking off, etc.

You need raytraced shadows or deep shadow map setting in at least one light to see shadows.

For night essences use night lights

First light without types of shadows
second one raytraced light
third one deep shadow map light
fourth two raytraced lights
fifth night light from predatron's essential lights

Hey. Thanks for bringing that up! I totally have looked at it. I even got to try it on a friend's computer. It's limited in some of the things I do, though. And it outlines stuff that's supposed to be turned off - I saw a thread where people were discussing how to get that to stop, but not being the owner of the puter and not having a manual I was like "yeah, about that." LOL. I was really doing a lot of effects with PWtoon that you can't really replace. I've tried a lot of shaders since it broke.

After many attempts for creating a look for a graphic novel with several toon shaders I decided that pwToon with the Crescent's pwToon Cel Shader Presets will just be the easiest as I have to do a lot less tweaking for scenes and props as well.

I did however noticed that pwToon doesn't cast an object's shadow? Is this correct or am I missing something?

I also want to ask those who work with toon renders, how best to create a night scene with pwToon. I noticed that I can't do that by just lowering the lights. I think only by changing the diffuse and shading colors to get darker colors, am I correct?

Below are a few examples of where I think shadows should be rendered, below the jets and the jet taking off, etc.

That is very odd KK, I'm getting very good consistent use of all content in DS 4.6.3.52. I've set myself up with just one major DIM installed content folder, fully controlled by the New PosterSQL Database Manager and to me the One Content Folder and this version of DAZ Studio has been the best version of DS4+ to date. I have not had one of the errors I did in many of the older versions. I will be loath to update to another version when they release one, this one has been so good to me.
I wish I could offer some advice but I'm just not seeing any errors in anything except pwToon which has been fully documented and reported to the Dev guys by more than just me.
And Yes I can use the set fully just as well in DS4.6.3 as I could in DS3A. Nothing is different at all that I can tell.
EDIT: Tip if you have Per Pixel Shading set to ON in the Prefs many Domes look wrong or even NOT there at all until rendered. I never use it.

I know what you're talking about utterly! I put in a ticket with DAZ about it. Maybe you could do the same? They told me they were having trouble recreating the problem, so perhaps if a new set of fingers typed to them it will help them figure it out. They really are on it. And I'm finding everywhere that people are saying "don't use realistic lighting with toon shaders" for DAZ as if just putting up with the problem should be the norm. I was using the way pwtoon rendered with Uberenvironment as a basis for creating a black and white look. No shiny glossy look from my render, no black and white look.

Because the manga shaders are on sale I bought them yesterday and have been working with them, but I'm still going to need pwtoon to create crisp lines. The geometric shell trick doesn't do it right.

I can confirm that this is a problem, and am actually quite happy to find out that it isn't just me...

Using pwToon with multiple light sources produces weird green/blue shading artefacts at points where shadows are generated from multiple sources. This is using the default spot/distant/point lights in Daz 4.6, with as far as I'm aware no Uber stuff going on at all. This happens regardless of what shadow type I have set, or even if there is no shadow type set at all. This started happening as soon as I upgraded to 4.6, and making sure that I have the latest pwToon installed has not rectified it.

Greetings,

My apologies if this has been asked before, or should have been asked in a different location. I did some simple searches before hand and nothing turned up.

Coming back to Daz after some years away from active use, I decided to do a fresh install of 4.6, and use the Install manager to download a few items to play around with. Because I run my OS of a small SSD, I changed the paths on everything to point to a larger secondary drive.

Mostly this works just fine, however I am finding that some items appear to have become somehow confused during the install manager process. For example, I told install manager to point to a location x. Daz has a content directory configured which is y. There are items which I have installed using the install manager, so they exist in x. However, when I surf the content directory to them in DAZ and double click, I am told that the files cannot be found. The path of the "missing" file is located in y.

Examples of products which have suffered this behavior are: pwToon, Manga Style shaders

Since this is my first outing in a long time with DAZ, and my first experience with the install manager, I'm uncertain if what I'm seeing is a bug or the result of misconfiguration on my part. Has anyone ever experienced anything similar, or could anyone recommend a solution. Alternatively, is this something I should open a ticket with support about?

My thanks for your time.

In my View it is either a render error in pwToon_DS4 or the way Uber shader lighting works with the Shader. I would send a Ticket to DAZ 3D on the matter, and to be frank I just assumed you already had before now. I'm not much of a Toon render type but I do get the Blue effect in any render using the combo of pwToon and Uber Shader lights, it must be something to do with both Shaders in one render.

I even installed the latest pwtoon in the system. I'm going to attach an image that was rendered before I upgraded from 4.5 to 4.6. You will have seen it before, because I think the last time I lamented the loss you tried to come to the rescue. It uses Uberenvironment, one ambient light and a spotlight.

But now with the same settings - in fact the same scene that once rendered perfectly (glad I saved it) - with the second attached image everything is horrible and blue. It didn't used to do that before, ergo it's not supposed to do that. I've been sitting here scared to death my puter was dying the way puters do with me. I work them very hard. But here I sit with a faster system as of today and things are still blue. Thus I am blue, and not because that's my nickname. This is one expensive way to discover it's not your system.

And the renders just don't have the same luster anymore either. That's probably because of the lighting. That beautiful crispness in the first image looked great when I did my conversion steps to turn it into manga zip shading in Paintshop Pro. Now I can't get that luster anymore, so things are just flat. And ugly. They don't convert as well through my process. I've spent the past several weeks since we last spoke about this experimenting with all sorts of settings and desperate answers, and I'm just not finding anything that works as well as before.

To get things to render NOT blue I have to have very very very little lighting, so that things are flat.

So yeah. Uberdisappoint.

Currently my husband is trying to find an older version of DAZ, and we're going to see if that's the issue. He had to go help one of his privates first... I tried installing an older version here but apparently you no longer can have two DAZ's on your computer or something. It threw a fit at me.

Yeah I've brought this up before.

Since my last thread lamenting the destruction of pwtoon in my life, I've upgraded lots of hardware. I thought that a new video card and various other things would fix my problem, that my hardware was dying.

Things are faster. But pwtoon still renders blue.

I m r very very disappointed.

All that's left is a new motherboard to replace (but why if this one is working fine and nothing has changed on the renders??) or, to blame, maybe pwtoon has a slight conflict with the latest Daz3D. I started having this issue right about when I upgraded from 4.5 to 4.6.

I really am very disappointed. My comic work has looked horrible for months with no solution.

All of a sudden I'm getting green shadows on my figure (seems the same green as the OP), its fine when I render with just an AOA Ambient light the green only appears when I load in a light with raytraced shadows.
I have applied the PWToon shader.
There's no colour in the lights or any green colour in the surface settings.

I'm having the exact same problem:

When I turn off perspective, all objects using the pwToon shader turn black.

Is there a workaround for this bug? I've tried adding more cameras to the scene, but they all render black when perspective is off (i.e. in any orthogonal view).

Thanks!

scorpio64dragon said:

Awesome product just loving playing with this.
I'm finding that it mixes well with other morphs especially the child and baby.
A couple of quick one without LAMH and using PWToon shader.

Very cool!!!

Rawn

Awesome product just loving playing with this.
I'm finding that it mixes well with other morphs especially the child and baby.
A couple of quick one without LAMH and using PWToon shader.

Pwtoon is not working i am working in daz 4.6pro anyone have an answer??????