Inhabitants of the world. Any need for illustrations?

[RPMiller]

There is a tutorial up at Renderosity for creating cartoon renders. I'm curious how close it is to your technique.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutor...torial_id=2139

[12rounds]

@RPMiller: that technique (variation of the z-tooning technique) is not what I use. I usually have one to two infinite lights and the tooning effects come thru shader nodes. There exists ways in shader nodes to limit tonal values to quadritonal, tritonal and bitonal. That z-tooning technique does not easily give out, f.ex. tritonal toons. Personally I like tritonal or smoothed images with strong blacklining. That technique in that article does not, I believe, give any easy way to produce contour outlines in bw. I always make at least two renders - one of which is a pure black/white render with outlines and contour lines only. Then in post-work I combine them. I tried z-tooning techniques years ago and was never able to produce results that I like. The major problems were detail loss in textures, lack of defined lines that separate objects and lack of ability to set tonal values in steps. Now with shaders I can control the outcome on material zone level. With IBL lightning z-tooning all I can control is the harshness of overall outcome. Not good enough for me.

[RPMiller]

Still won't share your technique eh?

[12rounds]

Well there isn't anything concrete to share really. There is no magic button that makes the images appear like that. I use Olivier's shaders as the basis of my shaders, but more often than not they need to be tweaked, omitted or changed quite a bit.

I got a very simple example. Let's take the skeleton warrior 10 or so pages down the road. Alongside the final result here is a render of the skeleton and a render of the same skeleton in black and white. Those two renders where the end of the line in 3D for me with this skeleton - the final result is achieved thru 2D work. In Photoshop I blend all the render layers and paint/draw/filter/smooth/darken/lighten to go where I want I to go. In the case of the skeleton I ended up painting the shredded clothing on the skelly.

In a contrary vein, the Lord Weers character above needed more complex shaders so as not to kill off texture details from the map. In that image I also wanted the shirt to retain a look of expensive fabric so I opted to change the shaders in a way that go thru all the whole tonal range of the underlying texture instead of cut it down into tritonal steps. Cutting the tonal ranges to steps would have meant that I would have lost the remnants of the textural details that remain in the final image.

[Redrobes]

Took me a while to find out what Oliviers toon shaders were so I thought id post the link here.

http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/bcs/in...vendor=Olivier

I don't know Poser so cant add to the discussion on them but it seems like pretty standard (if thorough) set of toon shaders. I ought to try and see what I can get out of blender. I dont think I would ever be able to make the art like what you have done tho even with all the tools and shaders at my disposal. What I lack is a +5 Hand of Drawing.

[RPMiller]

Well there isn't anything concrete to share really. There is no magic button that makes the images appear like that. I use Olivier's shaders as the basis of my shaders, but more often than not they need to be tweaked, omitted or changed quite a bit.

I got a very simple example. Let's take the skeleton warrior 10 or so pages down the road. Alongside the final result here is a render of the skeleton and a render of the same skeleton in black and white. Those two renders where the end of the line in 3D for me with this skeleton - the final result is achieved thru 2D work. In Photoshop I blend all the render layers and paint/draw/filter/smooth/darken/lighten to go where I want I to go. In the case of the skeleton I ended up painting the shredded clothing on the skelly.

In a contrary vein, the Lord Weers character above needed more complex shaders so as not to kill off texture details from the map. In that image I also wanted the shirt to retain a look of expensive fabric so I opted to change the shaders in a way that go thru all the whole tonal range of the underlying texture instead of cut it down into tritonal steps. Cutting the tonal ranges to steps would have meant that I would have lost the remnants of the textural details that remain in the final image.

Ah! Very good! I believe I have those shaders. I seem to recall picking them up a while back for making a comic book for my Champions group, but alas they group decided to switch to a different system and so I never did the comic. I'll have to take a look at them after the semester ends.

Any tips on specifically which shaders you are using and any node tweaks? If I could get close to your settings perhaps I could help you with at least providing you with 2d artwork to make all pretty and stuff. I have a huge collection of models purchased or found for free that I've amassed over the years.

[Redrobes]

I think I am a bit off the pace here. I dont know Blender well enough to make it do what I want. I am sure somebody could do better than this with it tho. Anyway, I have no intention of pursuing this - ill leave it to better skilled people.

Edit -- Theres more options that I didnt know about. Second one a little better I think. Sorta getting there.

[12rounds]

Sorta getting there.

Yup. But it's still missing the "human factor".

Just like in the music industry there exists separate (and also expensive!) software packages solely for the purpose of breaking the computer-generated sound. Adding a barely audible click, putting a hint of a dissonance on the middle-range of saxophone, doing delicate 1/128th tempo shifts on drums (making it sound like the drummer is actually playing very good, but not like a machine), tiny variations of volume levels within a short time period etc.

I believe the same applies to visual arts as well. Adding a ragged sketchy line here and another there are very powerful and underused means in digital visual arts. Also many digital artist purists want to show very complex textures in their full glory. I on the other hand believe that showing only a tiny fraction of a texture detail is enough to convey the viewer the idea that the whole thing in real life would have that same texture (like the shirt on Lord Weer's - the highlighted portions of the shirt's sleeves hint that the fabric has a nice and rich texturing, but to actually SHOW the whole shirt with that texture would make the image just look like a rendering).

[12rounds]

Any tips on specifically which shaders you are using and any node tweaks?

For organic models - like humans and animals and monsters - my first choice nowadays is the tritone shader (textured variant; keeps the underlying texture). I simplify the settings negating reflection nodes, toning down or disengaging specularity and sometimes killing off displacements and bumps. On other occasions I specifically put noise on bump channel. I use coarse line values between 0.5 and 0.7 and fine line values between 0.5 and 0.7 as well. F.ex. the thief/rogue woman on page 13 was done with coarse line and fine line values of 0.68 (too much - I would lessen the shader impact if I was making the image now). One white infinite light with intensity values of 125-140% is usually adequate (since most of the lightning comes from ambient channels) for my needs, but sometimes I use a second light for more dramatic effect. Light placement has an impact as well. For the main body of my illustrations I go for placing the light close to main camera.

I have no fixed settings - the settings live between images and it is common to turn off shaders altogether sometimes or to do a final render with different shaders on certain material zones. A common trick is also to lessen the impact of texture by 25-45% and set a diffuse color close to a average tonal value of the texture.

When I'm done, I do the same thing with a dual-tone shader and select the low backlight variant of the black/white shader. It gets me the b/w outlines. That render doesn't actually need to be very good since it's pretty easy to just draw missing lines in postwork.

I almost exclusively use P4 renderer disabling bump maps and shadows. At times I also make a firefly render with high AO levels and then do a slight overlay of that render on top of other layers in postwork - it gives nice soft shadows on armpits, creases etc.


Then again, on architectural models Olivier's shaders don't really work that good. Same goes for organic items with lots of alpha-mapped planes (like trees with leaves). When doing those, I resort to other means.

If I could get close to your settings perhaps I could help you with at least providing you with 2d artwork to make all pretty and stuff.

That would actually be pretty nice since I mostly find myself liking the postwork part of the process best. At times the 3d part gets boring - especially when dealing with Poser quirks.




Here's an example of a scene from around a month ago. I'm still not happy with it (ie. this is not going to be final version), but this has a totally different approach than when making humans (shader-wise, that is).

[RPMiller]

Excellent info. I will have to get in there and play around them. I own Poser 4,5,6, and 7, but currently only have 7 installed so I'll have to look at the P4 renderer which I rarely use since moving to 7.

Over the next few weeks, I'll try to get a few sample renders banged out and you can help me get pointed in the right direction regarding the nodes. Their flexibility tends to be their most frustrating aspect and without a full understanding of some of them I tend to get hit or miss results especially where the math nodes are concerned.