According to the readme:

... 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!)...

Sending a PM as I don't got any webspace.

Edit: Not sure if the PM went through, it is not in the "Sent" folder at least, but I am not sure how the new forum software handles these kind of things. At least I didn't get any error message, so I'll wait for feedback before "spamming" again :)

Hi y'all
just wanted to ask if somebody has a working link to the Crescent pwToon shader presets or if someone is able to make them available through any means.
I'm trying to get the results from the pwToon tutorials as well as other sources where the Crescent shader presets are always referred, e.g. this one here
http://cyonixgfx.deviantart.com/art/Cel-Shading-in-DAZ-Studio-156161543?q=gallery:poseraddicts/23879264&qo=5&offset=0).

Sadly enough my renders never turn out the way I want them. It seems like when I fiddle at one point it influences numerous other settings, so I never really seem to know what I'm doing.

I don't know about copyrights regarding these files, but since they're just settings of a commercial software and they're nowhere available any more I guess that should be ok, but correct me if you think I'm wrong.

Please, anyone, this would be greatly appreciated, guess there are many other people wanting these presets too.

thanks a lot in advance :)

So, I have Daz Pro version 4.5.0.114.

I have the newest version of pwToon, for Daz 4, installed and YES its the folders labled for DS4.
I redownloaded and reinstalled just in case.

But it's not working.

I click the presets and nothing applies.

The PwEffects don't work either, the pwCatch doesn't work, none of them work. None of the extra settings appear, no shader is being applied. It's broken!!!

I'm stumped. pwCatch worked partially in 4..... gimpy but kind of worked. So do none of them work in 4.5??? dammit. I need those things to work. Grr. :(

Thanks very much SickleYield!
I guess it's hard to do conforming clothing, like you just explained.

I probably found a solution to my problem. I also must say I'm using the M4 Business suit since I'm using M4 'cause I have already bought numeros poses and morphs for it.

I adjusted the pointed shoulders, bizeps, trizeps and arm settings to make everything thinner, then michael's skin poked through.
Next I turned the offending parts' visibility off, and there I am :-)

I know this is a somewhat unelegant hack, but it works fpor the time being.
Found out later why I could never use the morphs++ (which would have allowed me to make M4's figure thinner): I had to newly install them to my content directory, now they are available. Strange, since I also did some content rebuild stuff rom the content pane.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the moment, I think I'm getting more comfortable with DAZ studio every hour I'm using it :-).

Now I'm looking for someone to have a working download link for Crescent's pwToon Presets (which are referenced all over the tutorials but not downloadable any more). But that's another thread I guess.

Here's my scene... I've got the latest version of DSON-ready DS 4.5 installed. I've got a Genesis figure with the NanoSuit and the Supersuit. The Supersuit uses morphs and textures from the recent Dynamic Supersuit set. I've got one of 3DUniverse's light domes to provide a nice even light source. I can't seem to complete a render without getting some sort of crash.

After my first crash, I thought the problem might be with one of the HSS shaders, so I changed them all to the DS defaults...

After my next crash, I changed the lights from Ray Trace to Shadow Map...

After my next crash, I played with the Supersuit shaders again. They use a reflective map so I thought maybe changing to a different metallic texture would work...

Somewhere in there, I switched to a pwToon render and that seemed to work ok.

Might anyone have any suggestions on how I might be able to tinker with my PC to resolve these Runtime C++ errors? It's likely a memory issue as I've been getting them a lot since DS went to 4.5 but it's starting to get ridiculous...

Yea, I've spent a lot of time with trying to make them to the quality I'd like. I've had some luck using a little Sadie, a little Aiko4 stylizing morphs and a little hitomi using pwToon saders, but the issue tends to be something that would require me to learn how to make my own geometry morphs.

Anime characters tend to have impossibly sharp chins, a lack of cheekbones without a sinking cheek. I feel like the issue is that the Genesis/Gen4 models are originally for realistic figures and there isn't a morph set that removes that reality. The best of my anime adaptations don't cross the line into "anime" imo, and are left in this unnerving gray zone where they don't look quite right.

For those of you familiar with the concept, this is kind of a reverse uncanny valley effect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

Jay_NOLA said:

The other images helped cause I wasn't able too see the problem at first.

I spent the last 2 days doing searches and trying to duplicate the problem in Carrara 8 Pro so I could figure out what was going on.

The "flatness" is caused by the color(s) being too dark and it looks like the image is just flat, unless you examine it very carefully. I discovered this by looking at the plastic shader images and by various experiments to try and replicate them.

While experimenting I was able to get some test shaders and to have a dark flat look, but not to the level in your images.

Adjusting the Brightness & Specular settings of YAToon in the shader, and the Highlight and Shyness values of the shader may help.

Depending on how those were set I found would make shader have a flat dark look.

Just changing the top shader in C8 to YAToon isn't making it as dark as in the images you posted with the version of YAToon I'm using. I had to adjust the settings I mentioned to get it flat and dark looking. So the version of YAToon for C7 you are using appears to be bugged.

The C8 version is 1.20 and has a Checker and Color Balancer files that are added to the Extensions folder. All the older versions don't have versions of them. So the version you're using may need to have a version of them added to it so it will show the shader will look right.

The creator of YAToon last year on the forum said that a 1.21 or 1.30 version would come out for C8.5 at some point. To fix some problems when using it with C8.5. So development and work on YAToon isn't dead as far as I can tell.

You could try and contact the creator of YAtoon via Renderosity too, if contact via the YToon site doesn't work.

http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?userid=203102

Age of Armor made some free toon shaders for Carrara that you could try out I discovered while researching the problem with YAToon.

http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/downloads/aoa_toon_shaders.0.0.0.1.zip

Love your Arnold, I remember seeing him and some of you work on my Carrara 5 Pro Handbook disk.

Also, since combining YAToon with ToonPro got mentioned the creator of YAToon did that for several images you can see on the Renderosity site.

Wish I could have found out some more and an exact fix to the problem.

I checked out the YAToon creator's gallery. It appears that he never actually managed to blend Toon Pro and YAToon; he simply used YAToon and then rendered using Toon Pro's line art function.

The issue with Toon Pro (if there is one) is sort of the opposite issue that YAToon poses, which is why it'd be great to get them working together.

Toon Pro is really only worthwhile as a shader if you keep it to 2 tones. If you keep it 2 tone, it's great. The problem with Toon Pro is in it's shading and response to colors. If you take a white light and change it to, say, dark blue or red, those colors will not show up in your render; they'll only darken the existing colors that Toon Pro has decided will be your toon (2 tone) color palette. So if you change your light to blue, it's the same as taking your white light and dropping it down to 80% or whatever.

Additionally, Toon Pro needs a definitive light source. If your character is in shadow, you can kiss your 2 or three or 6 tones goodbye. You get a single, dull flat color and that's it. To me this is the worst thing about Toon Pro because it essentially eliminates its use as a standalone shader in Carrara. If you want your character creeping into a dark room lit by a reddish glow, you have to render that character on full blast under white hot lights and then take it into a secondary program (like PS) to bring in the darkness and the reds.

Personally I think it's probably a stretch to believe that we can have YAToon and Toon Pro working in the same render as shaders. In my experience they pretty much demolish one another when you load them. But like I said, someone was talking about "transitioning" between shaders within a single set of keyframes via using some kind of slider designated specifically for a shading domain. Now, is that specifically for certain *kinds* of shaders? Dunno. But I'll keep looking into it.

And just to really quickly extrapolate on why YAToon would be helpful and why it's really not strong enough on its own -- unlike Toon Pro, it's 2 tone capabilities, IMO, are pretty weak. It has a very digitally/pixelated quality to it, especially when in motion. I was able to get around this issue by diminishing the specularity darkness almost entirely. I don't have it in front of me, but I believe my Carrara YAToon numbers were something like...

100 10
5 0
70 100
20 83

I might have those mixed up and I can't remember what any of them mean except for 83 is for brightness. If I missed two boxes (if there's 10, not 8), they'd both be 100s.

Going this route gives a nice soft shade, but the other issue with YAToon is that it completely distorts the original color, whereas Toon Pro does a decent job preserving it.

So for instance, I would render something out using YAToon, and then I'd have to go into PS and like create a flesh colored filter and just slap it on some ghostly white skin. Not the best way to work unless all of your characters are wearing black.

And in all honesty, I pretty much gave up on the process. I spent a good two months experimenting with different styles between YAToon and Toon Pro, and in the end I decided that there was no way to get an effective toon shading for *motion* inside of DAZ/Carrara on traditional M4/V4 figures. Including using Toon Pro's line renderer, which is death to anything creative you might want to do using existing, say, clothing.

For backgrounds and solid objects, Toon Pro set at 2 tones is amazing. But for M4/V4 tooned? I don't much believe in it. I can create some nice images using Toon Pro or YAToon along with PS, etc, but for moving images, you need something else to assist these products.

I've tried AE's toon filter with YAToon and Toon Pro each. Nasty results.

FlyingDutchman (everyone knows) did a great looking PWToon-to-Anime Studio Pro render. But when you get into the depth of time it takes to animate and render something; to have to do it over and over again for a single shot is pretty extensive. Imagine how long it takes to animate and render a scene in Carrara (even using motion capture), and then multiply that by at least three steps (if you have the right programs and filters), and that's the kind of workload you'd be looking at. And, realistically, the only sure fire solution for animation would be:

Toon Pro Render
YAToon Render
AE filter and blend
Rotoscope final character artwork

It's either that or FlyingDutchman's

Traditional Render
Toon Render
Blend Render
Anime Studio Render
Final Blend Render

I made the decision to abandon Carrara Toon style animation and instead just apply what I've learned to still images, which I'm transforming into a motion comic in AE. To me, either motion comic or separating the pieces of an image into individual symbols for Flash style animation are the only two viable options. Anything animated solely in Carrara or DAZ in the "toon" style is probably going to leave you less than thrilled -- which isn't okay considering the amount of work that's required to animate.

But like I said, toon shaders with some post tweaking is completely solid. This image is largely Toon Pro just doing it's thang.

Proxima Shining said:

Yeah, I have BishounenTaurus´s Visual Style Shaders and they are great. And I recently checked pwToon with Crescent presets and liked them very much also.

BishounenTaurus´s Visual Style look amazing. As soon as i have access to dollars I will purchase inmediately.

Paradigm67 said:

Currently the only real resource for Cell Shading renders is to use pwToon's Shaders with some old free shader presets by Crescent that take a good amount of adjustment to work. I don't know what the market is for this kind of thing, but it'd be nice to see some high quality Cell Shading shaders!

With appropriate set of lights, PWtoon + Crecent work fine. Image (1) and (2) were created with this combo.

But a very intensive set of light can be a problem. I'm working with a shader for cell shading that control global light intensity, global light tone, shadow coverage, and others. Image (3) and (4-5) are an example from my work. It must consider that it is in a very early stage of development.

vrba79 said:

This also sheds like on my PWtoon problem. Its a Studio Issue, because it renders as it should when I use 3Delight externally.

That's interesting.

Since the stand alone is just recompiling the actual shader, I wonder if something in Studio is coming into play to either prevent a recompile or some scripting change/error is preventing it...if you wanted to play around, you could check the sdl for it in the RIB folder and compare it to the one in Studio (if you can find it...they can be hard to find, without doing a complete system search)

This also sheds like on my PWtoon problem. Its a Studio Issue, because it renders as it should when I use 3Delight externally.

Kerya said:

Thorrhovan said:

In 2011 I purchased the pw shader bundle. But this bundle does not work with DAZ 4.5 and not with 4.5.0.137. The renders only show up in black. When will this problem be fixed? I use those shaders quite often and was forced to install 4.0.3 for these shaders.

Ehm ... did you reset your downloads? They are all updated:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5976/

Yeah, I have BishounenTaurus´s Visual Style Shaders and they are great. And I recently checked pwToon with Crescent presets and liked them very much also.

Please file a support ticket and/or bug report on pwToon, if you haven't.

Richard Haseltine said:

vrba79 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

vrba79 said:

scorpio64dragon said:

vrba79 said:

Pwtoon is still borked.
I reset my download, uninstalled/reinstalled, and all I can get, no matter the settings or light setups, is a flat, solid color figure when rendering.

Its working for me. Which version of PWtoon are you installing

"pwToon - 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe - pc" <- Its what came up after I reset my download for it, so I assume that is the fixed version that should work with 4.5</div>

Is the shader applying - if you look in the Surfaces pane, with a tooned surface selected, the shader should be listed at the top of the pane.

Applies just fine. There is absolutely no hint of a problem, until I render.
This is a chair prop with any given PWtoon settings applied.
I followed the instructions to refresh my item history, to get the updated plugin to show up in my available downloads, uninstalled the old version, restarted the pc, installed the new version and everything.
On a whim I even tried the presets for DS2 and DS3, in addition to the ones for DS4. Same result, every time.
Fidgeting with different lights and render settings do nothing to change the end result either.
Btw, I'm using 64bit D|S Pro.
Another tidbit: It doesn't have that little [shader] tab super-imposed over each option, like it does with other shaders.

And you actually looked in the Surfaces pane, to see that the shader was applied, not just accepted a lack of error messages? Try opening the log file (Help>Troubleshooting>View Log), immediately after rendering, and scroll to the end to se if there are any 3Delight error messages.

Script executed successfully.
Executing DAZ Script file: C:/Users/avrba/Documents/DAZ 3D/Studio/My Library/Shaders/pwToon_DS4/pwToon Resources/Cartoon Classic.ds
Script executed successfully.
Rendering image
WARNING: general\dztokenbuffer.cpp(1516): The token "float GlossinessStrength" already exists!
DEBUG: pwToon trial expired.
WARNING: general\dztokenbuffer.cpp(1516): The token "float GlossinessStrength" already exists!
DEBUG: pwToon trial expired.
WARNING: general\dztokenbuffer.cpp(1516): The token "float GlossinessStrength" already exists!
DEBUG: pwToon trial expired.
WARNING: general\dztokenbuffer.cpp(1516): The token "float GlossinessStrength" already exists!
DEBUG: pwToon trial expired.
WARNING: general\dztokenbuffer.cpp(1516): The token "float GlossinessStrength" already exists!
DEBUG: pwToon trial expired.
3Delight message #45 (Severity 2): S2069: the interface of shader 'C:/Program Files/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4/shaders/pwToon.sdl' is invalid
3Delight message #45 (Severity 2): S2051: cannot load shader 'pwToon', will use 'defaultsurface'
Created RenderCacheBlock

Its saying something about a trial(wtf?), and not being able to load the shader. That's a new one on me! Last time I checked its a shader, not a plugin,
and there is no trail version. Its got to be a problem on PWtoon's end of things. Daz's rudimentary toon shaders work. Still,
I'd much rather have my PWtoon up and running again.

vrba79 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

vrba79 said:

scorpio64dragon said:

vrba79 said:

Pwtoon is still borked.
I reset my download, uninstalled/reinstalled, and all I can get, no matter the settings or light setups, is a flat, solid color figure when rendering.

Its working for me. Which version of PWtoon are you installing

"pwToon - 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe - pc" <- Its what came up after I reset my download for it, so I assume that is the fixed version that should work with 4.5</div>

Is the shader applying - if you look in the Surfaces pane, with a tooned surface selected, the shader should be listed at the top of the pane.

Applies just fine. There is absolutely no hint of a problem, until I render.
This is a chair prop with any given PWtoon settings applied.
I followed the instructions to refresh my item history, to get the updated plugin to show up in my available downloads, uninstalled the old version, restarted the pc, installed the new version and everything.
On a whim I even tried the presets for DS2 and DS3, in addition to the ones for DS4. Same result, every time.
Fidgeting with different lights and render settings do nothing to change the end result either.
Btw, I'm using 64bit D|S Pro.
Another tidbit: It doesn't have that little [shader] tab super-imposed over each option, like it does with other shaders.

And you actually looked in the Surfaces pane, to see that the shader was applied, not just accepted a lack of error messages? Try opening the log file (Help>Troubleshooting>View Log), immediately after rendering, and scroll to the end to se if there are any 3Delight error messages.

Well I think they skipped PWtoon, because its busted.

Richard Haseltine said:

vrba79 said:

scorpio64dragon said:

vrba79 said:

Pwtoon is still borked.
I reset my download, uninstalled/reinstalled, and all I can get, no matter the settings or light setups, is a flat, solid color figure when rendering.

Its working for me. Which version of PWtoon are you installing

"pwToon - 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe - pc" <- Its what came up after I reset my download for it, so I assume that is the fixed version that should work with 4.5</div>

Is the shader applying - if you look in the Surfaces pane, with a tooned surface selected, the shader should be listed at the top of the pane.

Applies just fine. There is absolutely no hint of a problem, until I render.
This is a chair prop with any given PWtoon settings applied.
I followed the instructions to refresh my item history, to get the updated plugin to show up in my available downloads, uninstalled the old version, restarted the pc, installed the new version and everything.
On a whim I even tried the presets for DS2 and DS3, in addition to the ones for DS4. Same result, every time.
Fidgeting with different lights and render settings do nothing to change the end result either.
Btw, I'm using 64bit D|S Pro.
Another tidbit: It doesn't have that little [shader] tab super-imposed over each option, like it does with other shaders.

vrba79 said:

scorpio64dragon said:

vrba79 said:

Pwtoon is still borked.
I reset my download, uninstalled/reinstalled, and all I can get, no matter the settings or light setups, is a flat, solid color figure when rendering.

Its working for me. Which version of PWtoon are you installing

"pwToon - 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe - pc" <- Its what came up after I reset my download for it, so I assume that is the fixed version that should work with 4.5</div>

Is the shader applying - if you look in the Surfaces pane, with a tooned surface selected, the shader should be listed at the top of the pane.

scorpio64dragon said:

vrba79 said:

Pwtoon is still borked.
I reset my download, uninstalled/reinstalled, and all I can get, no matter the settings or light setups, is a flat, solid color figure when rendering.

Its working for me. Which version of PWtoon are you installing

"pwToon - 7253_pwToon_1.2_ds.exe - pc" <- Its what came up after I reset my download for it, so I assume that is the fixed version that should work with 4.5</p>