Sorry for asking such silly questions.

I am using DAZ and happy with Genesis figure for my work. I also use other DAZ assets.

I want to know in quick points what are advantages Carrara offers over DAZ ? Just few quick points that may help understand Carrara better and decide if switching to Carrara is worthwhile. I do more of Toon works. I use PWTOON and Visual Shaders for my work.

I am using PWTOON and Visual Shader. I mix them in characters. I do not use high res texture. So practically I do not need extremely high quality rendering. I mostly need nice warm Flat colours with shadow. Since DAZ does not have real time rendering, how to REDUCE the rendering time ? I am using the Default renderer, not the Toon renderer. What are the parameter I must avoid to increase the Rendering Speed ?

This looks very good right out of the box and it appears to handle textured surfaces quite well really :)

With my current "toon" render approaches I have to fiddle quite a bit with the materials to get it right - e.g. using the pwToon presets from Crescent or similar. You did get my attention certainly with your approach, but you might have already figured that out, so perhaps good if others chime in as well :)

CallieVee I maybe wrong but I think that setting is primarily like working in wireframe to cut down on overloading the system when you are setting up a scene .....I've never figured out how to get it to actually render out toonish, you might want to look at pwToon shaders ,to get the toon effects you want .....

Results with pwToon are very good. With my own toonshader outline are lost, with pwtoon a cool outline effect is shown. The only problem is time to render, with a simple light I need 30 minutes to render this simple scene, time consumed for hair area.

I just did a nice long render in DS 4.5 using pwSurface2 so I had a long time to see this message:

Rendering...
3Delight message #45 (Severity 1): S2072: the shader 'C:/Program Files/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4/shaders/pwSurface2.sdl' uses a different interface version. Automatic conversion was successful. It should be recompiled for better performance.

This message is similar to one I get when using pwToon in my scenes. Anyone have a clue as to what DS is referring to?

I still use 32 bits computers. The latest versions of DS 4.5 seem to have plugged quite a few memory holes. I can get a single figure with UE2 (or rather indirect camera), LAMH hair and highres textures (i.e. the typical 4000*4000 textures) using under 700 MB of memory according to Task Manager. Remember to enable the 3GB switch and you should be able to at least make a complete scene with two clothed figures without any particular problem.
I only own PwEffect of the pw line and it does work. I've been meaning forever to get PwToon but something else of higher priority always came up when it was on sale.

I'd recently downloaded the new version of DS 4.5 and was trying to use pwToon, but I got memory errors that caused DS to crash. So I downloaded and installed pwToon. DS still crashed but not as often. I figured it was the strain of using DS4.5 on my 32-bit Windows XP PC, so I gritted my teeth, shrugged my shoulders and forged ahead.

Then I installed Install Manager. While playing around in it, I noticed that pwToon, pwSurface 1 and 2, pwGhost, and pwEffect didn't show up in my list of downloadable items. Curious.

Then I got word from the bug tracker that said that DAZ was waiting for the new version of 3Delight. This leads me to a bunch of questions...

1) What's the status on the pw family of shaders? Will they be updated once the new version of 3Delight in integrated into DS (especially since I've spotted errors while rendering that state that the pwToon shader should be recompiled)?

2) If it's true that my days are numbered using DS 4.5 on my old PC, what can I do to forestall the moment that I need to get a new PC? Might more RAM help? I have about 3GB now, but what might be optimal?

3) Is anyone else using DS 4.5 on a 32-bit PC? What configuration are you using? Can any of the pw family of shaders work on your system?

4) This one's more of a technical question. I have pwToon for DS 4, but I have presets originally created for DS 3. If I apply any of the DS3 presets in 4.5, does DS have enough sense to still use the DS 4 shader instead of the DS 3 one in my scene? This was one of those crazy questions I had when DS 4.5 would crash when I'd try to render.

Thanks in advance for any help.

austingraphics said:

Can you update the step by step guide to reference DS 4.5 software. None of the toon shaders (PWtoon, Manga or Visual style) work in 4.5

I see this is your first post. How experienced are you with shaders? Do you know that you have to render an image to see how it looks with the shader? That the way it looks in Daz Studio is different from the rendered picture?

Yes they do PWtoon and Visual stylecertainly do, sorry don't have the manga but I would presume that they do also.
Check that you have the latest DS4.5 and the latest version of the shaders.

Can you update the step by step guide to reference DS 4.5 software. None of the toon shaders (PWtoon, Manga or Visual style) work in 4.5

Edit: Never mind. Confused them with the pwToon shaders in the store. The paid ones. Though, the fact they're called pwToon shaders does leave me a little concerned about exactly how legitimate they are. If they're based off the original pwToon shaders, but can be used without buying them, then I'm pretty sure that would be a EULA breach.

Someone has put them up here : http://www.sendspace.com/file/jwz2td
I downloaded these a few weeks ago, and in the Readme it says:

These shaders are open source. Feel free to distribute them, modify them, etc., just don't charge money for them. They require Poseworks' pwToon which is available at DAZ3d.com. (pwToon is NOT open source!)

digitalcraft said:

Sometime back Crescent's PWTOON Presets were floating on the net alongwith tutorials. Now the links are dead.
Anybody willing to share this free preset with me ?

Regards

Prabhat

Sorry but only Crescent can do that even thought they are freebie's they still can't just be shared out

Sometime back Crescent's PWTOON Presets were floating on the net alongwith tutorials. Now the links are dead.
Anybody willing to share this free preset with me ?

Regards

Prabhat

marble said:

So many excellent renders! I'm sure I'm not the only one who would greatly appreciate tips on how to achieve such wonderful results. I have the Visual Style shaders and PWToon but, try as I might, I can't get close to the quality I've seen in this thread.

agreed. I have PWtoon, and no idea how to use it or any other shaders for that matter. I especially want to be able to do the B&W one in pwtoon.

So many excellent renders! I'm sure I'm not the only one who would greatly appreciate tips on how to achieve such wonderful results. I have the Visual Style shaders and PWToon but, try as I might, I can't get close to the quality I've seen in this thread.

Hi
I was wondering how I might be able to save a complete scene, including the models, textures, shaders etc that i have used in it.

To be more specific, I have created animations using M4 wearing multiple clothing items, utilizing some head morph injections, hair, pwToon shaders, custom texture maps. Animated with aniblocks/aniMate2.
Right now it's ok for me to save the .duf files with the scene.

What I'm worried about is if I have to redo some of this stuff for my customer in one year and I maybe have to use another machine or platform where I have to freshly install DAZ studio.

I already had that problem when I wanted to install my stuff on a second Mac in order to simultaeously render final movies where DAZ studio kept on asking for files.

There may also arise the situation that within my company a co-worker has to edit some stuff, being on his/her own machine without the massive DAZ items database I have installed on my Mac.
Or having the DAZ files installed on a drive with a different name, which screws up the paths saved with the .duf file.

I figured if I might save everything utilized in one collected package I might be spared from that problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

pwToon works well for me in DS 4.5.1.6
The file that I have in my downloads is 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe, and that appears to work in DS 4.5. Did you reset your downloads for pwToon recently?

Thx guys, I reinsttalled PWToon and it's working fine now. Haven't used it since I switched from DS4 to 4.5. It worked in 4, but may have had some issue when I switched. As long as it's working I'm happy.