David Brinnen said:

TapiocaTundra said:

Toon shaders in Bryce eh , am a little dubious as to the possibilities of obtaining credible results, it might pay to have a look at the quality and comparison of some of the renderman shaders and their usage in 3Delight with Daz Studio, you chaps have a long way to go, best of luck :)

It is a challenge yes. Do you have any links to the things you are talking about because this forums search engine is not very helpful?

So far as I know Renderman is a professional-grade plug in for Maya, not cheap, not for Daz Studio, and not a fair yardstick for measuring against Bryce at all. Daz has several "cartoon" or art style shaders in their store, in addition to the free carton renderer that comes with Studio, that make a fairer comparison. I've played with pwToon, Manga Style Shader and Visual Style Shader and think they are all quite good for what they do at a reasonable price. All of those products have accurate representative promo images in the DAZ store, easy to find.

I think your results are quite promising, David, and resemble what the Manga Style shader produces - see attached. Perhaps terrains in Bryce could be rendered in a cartoon style and composited in as backgrounds for character renders done elsewhere. If you could figure out how to make Bryce add in cartoon outlines around the edges of objects, that would be an nice feature, to eliminate the need to do that in postwork with edge detection. One effect I have admired and not seen achieved in Studio or Poser is the "stylize" effect that alien skin promotes at http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/examples-illustration.aspx for their photoshop plugin. The clouds in your render are not too far off. Solid color bands with outlines would be awesome, and of course many other effects are possible. This is the sort of thing you could make a product out of, if you are so inclined. I would buy it.

Hi all, this is my entry. It originally started as DAZ Monstrosities: Undead Fiend but i think I spun pretty much every morph dial I had and kinda lost track of what I used.

Figure used: DAZ Monstrosities: Undead Fiend, Genesis creature creator bundle.

Title: The Last Grab.

Programs used: Daz3D, PWToon.

No post work.

dan.shive said:

Earlier today, I saw the trailer for a new Gulity Gear game. Approximately a minute into the video, my mind exploded.

Is it foolish to hope that one day DAZ could pull off similar renders?

Now what would a good lighting set up for something like SSS be?
I know, really vague question, but like with PWtoon, there are certain lighting setups that just get you better results, while others just look bloody terrible.

Also, what would be a good way to get a toon hair style with SSS? Yes, buying that spiffy gummy shader looks like a great option, but lets just say that someone is already tapped out on funds for new 3d goodies for the month. ^_^;

As I understand it the shader uses the angle to decide where to put the outline - so when the whole surface is at an acute angle to the line of sight the whole surface ends up as outline. pwToon suffers this less, and is more adjustable, plus you can simply not use the toon sahder on the ground if you use a per-surface approach with shaders rather than using the render mode switch. You could also make the ground a separate pass, with different settings, then place the figure on top of it.

With the pinup presets in pwToon, the problem was that they were almost TOO specific to a certain set of hair, skin type, and clothing. The colors of the outlines and shading left me scratching my literal-minded head a bit as to how to adapt them to other objects.

JimmyC_2009 said:

There are no shadows by default in DS, you have to turn them on in the lighting Parameters pane for each light you are using. If you are not using added lights, then shadows is not your problem, it may be a parameter of pwToon that is set in a way that you don't want..

Can you post an image of what it is you are seeing?

Here it is. Now I know throwing in lights will be the only way to truly brighten the image up, however, I am looking at just having the basic option to post work shadowing or just have a clean image without shadows. As you see the floor in the first image is all blacked out. The panel in the second one on the floor, centered, is black despite having a panel like the ones in front of the seat. I know what you mean about having no shadow by default as I have rendered ones clean and everything shows up fine, albeit dim.

There are no shadows by default in DS, you have to turn them on in the lighting Parameters pane for each light you are using. If you are not using added lights, then shadows is not your problem, it may be a parameter of pwToon that is set in a way that you don't want..

Can you post an image of what it is you are seeing?

SmallFry said:

5) Presets, presets, presets. pwToon offered presets for Pin-Up styles, but only for a small subset of what's out there. What does one do to create a Pin-up look for someone who's not a blonde California girl wearing a white shirt and blue shorts?
6) Something that I don't have to use the Shader Editor to customize. I have a college degree in Computer Science, but the Shader Editor confuses me. I just want to make pretty pictures, not program a new shader.

Six affect five. I am just now creating a series of color preset for my shader and having catalogued four or five variations in 45 fundamental colors is a nightmare make all this presets. Shader editor and surface tab doesn't aid. I understand when people only set a few presets in their products.

SnowSultan said:

You know more about building shaders than I do, so point taken. :) I'm actually not sure what the point outlines not being dependent on light is though, the only thing that would be nice to have regarding outlines would be to be able to choose exactly where they have more weight (thickness), and I don't imagine that's possible in 3D.

Shadows are really the issue though, no matter how it's done. They're the reason why 3D art doesn't look 2D (and not having as many cartoony hair styles as realistic ones doesn't help either). ;)

Actually, you COULD do that through a texture. For example, if you had a texture that was all dark gray, with a light gray area painted onto the nose, you could incorporate that in such a way that it would give the nose thinner outlines. It wouldn't fix the unevenness of edge_blend outlines, but if something like pwToon (which has even width outlines) allowed you to plug textures into the toon line width it'd probably work. Unfortunately pw doesn't seem to be around anymore, so it's not like we could ask him to make any changes to his shader (or make a new one).

Like I said before though, I unfortunately don't know how to recreate pwToon's outline effect, so the closest I can offer is the geometry shell one.

Going back to your thing about shadows, I had a think about it, and I did think of a method that might work, though not to the extent you're thinking. Again, you could probably use a sort of "shadow map" to dictate where you want any permanent shadows, like under the nose, in the belly button, around some of the muscles. I say a "shadow map" rather than painting them directly onto the diffuse (like on Hitomi's and Hiro5's textures) as then it would also react to the cel-shading colours you choose.

Painting plugin???

Well, I do remember Casual expressing an interest in doing a painting plugin once he finished his sculpting plugin (mcjWarp).
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21044/

Zev0 said:

Yes. Can you post an example of what yours look like?

I don't have a render with me handy, although the promo renders for Manga Style should be enough: http://www.daz3d.com/manga-style-shaders

The outline method Manga Style uses is the same "edge_blend" method used by pretty much every other Daz Studio/Poser toon shaders, by which I mean the lines appear uneven as if they'd been inked by hand.

The edge_blend (a.k.a fresnel) method is not light dependant, but geometry dependant. Basically, it takes the angles of the polygons (compared to the camera) and uses them to determine where the edges of the mesh is. This information can then be used to generate a basic outline. However, the method isn't that accurate, causing the line to vary in width depending on how curved a surface is. Surfaces with straight corners (such as a cube, a sword, or a staircase) do not work well with this method.

What Manga Style did was add an extra option that allowed you to make these (uneven) outlines thinner or thicker depending on the lighting in the scene, to mimic the common inking method of using thicker lines to emphasise shading.

Currently, the only way to get accurate even width outlines like the ones you're looking for is to use pwToon, which uses a much more complex method of generating outlines using a combination of depth and normal passes and per-pixel edge detection (at the expense of increased render times). I know the general gist of how it works, but not enough to replicate it myself unfortunately.

That said, I have been able to achieve some good results using the Geometry Shell along with a custom shader (which I have released for free here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21273/ ). It uses a very simple method that has been used in many cel-shaded videogames such as Jet Set Radio. Because it uses the Geometry Shell, it can be combined with any shader you wish (whether it be Visual Style, or UberSurface). Below is a render I made using the Geometry Shell outline.

I tend to go for a cell style look that I can use for single images and for short animated clips. Most shaders I noticed don't work that well if your doing animation.

My major inspiration tend to be in no particular order as follows:

Duplicating the look in the RPG Maker Portraits that come with XP, VX, VX Ace, and in the Samurai VX Materials. Other style seen in RPG Maker products I'm not interested in trying to duplicate.

The biggest problems I run into is that getting the hair and face to look right doesn't always work. Some figures and hair styles I've noticed don't come out that good. When doing too renders.

I mostly use Carrara for my Toon rendering as i have several plugins to help with that and shaders. DAZ Studio is next and I've gotten good results.

I don't like using DS since the Toon rendering doesn't work correctly. When the change occurred to 4.5 the toon rendering got messed up, and I have seen that will render correctly with my olde DS 3 or would on the on DS 4, but don't with DS 4.5. I had reported the problem on Mantis and mentioned the problem on the forums when 4.5 first was released.

I hate post-work and try and get everything to look good with just one render, even if it means I spend more time working in the 3D program to do this.

What I look for in a shader is:
1.) Easy of use. I want something I'm not going to have to spend a lot of time on tweaking to get it look right.
2.) Presets and example scenes. I do like how PWToon has numerous preset and other presets you can download. For example scenes I like when they use common things you would have in your runtime or free objects, To clarify by what I mean by common Aiko 3, Mecha Girl for A 3, V4 base, and other items you would have in your runtime if you were doing 3D. What I don't mean by common is a hairstyle or outfit that a person most likely won't have in their runtime. Amarseda Hairfor example is more likely to be in a person's runtime than Tuesday Hair.
3.) A clear manual and tutorial on using the Shader. One thing I like about the Visual Style Shaders and Manga Style ones is that PDF guides exist.
4.) Presets for lights and cameras. For toon rendering I use a very different light setting than I would for other types of renders. Having presets for lighting and camera position to help one learn how to best use lighting when working with the shaders is very helpful.

Agent_Unawares said:

BishounenTaurus said:

Well, Borderlands does it mostly through textures. They use shaders to produce the basic cel-shading effect, as well as basic outlines for the scenery, but all of the intricate detailing is done through the textures, by which I mean they actually draw a lot of the outlines on the textures themselves. It's a really simple method that makes a huge difference.
The cel-shading effect and halfway decent-looking outlines are what I want, though. "Toon Outline" and variations on edge blend don't really cut it thus far. Granted, I'd be even happier with ones that look like the comic-style inking I posted.

You might want to take a look at the Free Geometry Shell Outline shader I released in the Freepository. It's a free and improved version of the bonus shader included with Manga Style, and because it uses the Geometry Shell it can be used in conjunction with any other shader out there.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21273/

I can get a pretty decent approximation using pwToon, but I don't think that's what you're asking. I might be wrong, but I suspect you're asking because investigating options for another possible shader set. :) Nothing wrong with that!

My lips are sealed. ;)

I'm in a similar boat as Agent_Unawares, but I might go further back to artists like Wally Wood, Alex Raymond, and Al Williamson. Their work would influence people like John Buscema, Dave Cockrum and Jim Steranko. It's a lot cleaner than the sketchy work Frank Miller has done lately and has a more classic look.

I can get a pretty decent approximation using pwToon, but I don't think that's what you're asking. I might be wrong, but I suspect you're asking because investigating options for another possible shader set. :) Nothing wrong with that!

The difficulty I see with a non-photo real (NPR) set is that it's not as widespread a rendering style. It might be because of the extra hoops one has to go through in order to get a decent NPR look: first set up the character, then make sure all the right textures are applied, then apply the shader and hope it works correctly (because pwToon and a couple of others don't handle texture tiling so it kind of kills using any plaid textures, or even the great textures that come with the Supersuit sets), then light it.

Then (and this is the part that sometimes kills it for me), post the image that you're so proud of somewhere and not get any response to it, positive or negative. Is it because of the subject matter? Is it because it's rendered in an NPR manner? I once had a chat here with writer/artist Chuck Austen about this and he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the work he got the most positive responses from was his photoreal work. I'm sorry, I might just be venting a bit, but working in an NPR style can be very frustrating sometimes. :down::down:

Heck, in the latest version of DS, I can't even get DAZ's Default Toon Shaders to work correctly. Apparently it's been a problem for a while. You can see how DAZ barely even noticed if this has been a bug for a bit. :P

But if you're asking, here's what I'm looking for:
1) A Toon shader that is easy to use. Too many unexplained options can kill a shader dead from being used more than once. The Mirei shader comes quickly to mind.
2) A Toon shader that allows for texture tiling.
3) A Toon shader that allows for different styles and looks, from black and white classic line work to a cartoon style comparable to that Borderlands image above or from Champions Online.
4) A Toon shader that doesn't take forever to render.
5) Presets, presets, presets. pwToon offered presets for Pin-Up styles, but only for a small subset of what's out there. What does one do to create a Pin-up look for someone who's not a blonde California girl wearing a white shirt and blue shorts?
6) Something that I don't have to use the Shader Editor to customize. I have a college degree in Computer Science, but the Shader Editor confuses me. I just want to make pretty pictures, not program a new shader.

That's a start, I guess. Here, I'll hand the soapbox to someone else for a bit...

...

For anyone that uses Uber products and haven't been to his YouTube videos lately, it's well worth going through again. I just did and picked up a lot of stuff I forgot, and even more I didn't fully understand the last time I went through them. Here's his website for quick reference to documentation.

And on a related note, here's pwSurface, pwCatch, pwToon, and pwEffect. There doesn't seem to be one for pwGhost. I haven't found any video tutorials on them.

scorpio64dragon said:

http://www.daz3d.com/visual-style-shaders

They're very nice shaders but its a bind to have to put the textures back in all the time manually which is why personally I prefer PWToon.

Thanks for the link. So holding the control key when applying these shaders will not allow you to 'ignore' the replacing of the textures???

http://www.daz3d.com/visual-style-shaders

They're very nice shaders but its a bind to have to put the textures back in all the time manually which is why personally I prefer PWToon.

jonathan said:

Hi, I'm new to 3D modeling, and it's just a hobby. First posting on the forums. Thanks for all the information from many generous people on the forums. I just purchased Sheer Greatness and Visual Style Shaders because of the sale today and this is my first effort with them. It's not prizewinning, but easier than expected and results are not all that bad (if I do say so myself) for a noob.

The model is teen Julie. Visual Style Shader for all the textures and hair (PH Crazy) on Julie. Dress is SDRLiner from Summer Dress for Genesis with Sheer Greatness texture. Wings (Tanager) from Songbird remixed with pwToon shader. Smoke effect from Fire and Smoke for DAZ. Skydome from The Church, probably.

A few defects - lines are visible in the Skydome backdrop. Not happy with Julie's eyes, but perhaps I needed to start with a more anime friendly figure. I could have fiddled with the colors in the shaders more for more balanced results, but just ran out of time. Just posting for some sympathy, I guess.

Sheer Greatness seems most promising -- don't expect I'll use the stockings much, but the textures seem handy for many things on their own! Visual Style Shader also seems promising.

Could someone please provide a link to the visual style shader. I could not find the product and am curious.

Hi, I'm new to 3D modeling, and it's just a hobby. First posting on the forums. Thanks for all the information from many generous people on the forums. I just purchased Sheer Greatness and Visual Style Shaders because of the sale today and this is my first effort with them. It's not prizewinning, but easier than expected and results are not all that bad (if I do say so myself) for a noob.

The model is teen Julie. Visual Style Shader for all the textures and hair (PH Crazy) on Julie. Dress is SDRLiner from Summer Dress for Genesis with Sheer Greatness texture. Wings (Tanager) from Songbird remixed with pwToon shader. Smoke effect from Fire and Smoke for DAZ. Skydome from The Church, probably.

A few defects - lines are visible in the Skydome backdrop. Not happy with Julie's eyes, but perhaps I needed to start with a more anime friendly figure. I could have fiddled with the colors in the shaders more for more balanced results, but just ran out of time. Just posting for some sympathy, I guess.

Sheer Greatness seems most promising -- don't expect I'll use the stockings much, but the textures seem handy for many things on their own! Visual Style Shader also seems promising.

In a total leap away from my usual I've been playing around with toon shaders since recently picking up the Poseworks pwToon set. I think it'll take me a little time to master, but here's something I came up with in the interim. So far, the results are quite promising.