Non-photorealistic Renders (NPR)
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
David: Interesting look. And yes, I know about life and bills and whatnot. :-) Those are the same reasons my own projects are so far behind. I have decided to focus on creating a smaller story by the end of the year: Just 8-10 pages. I think that will help me stay focused and actually get some pages done. As soon as I finish updating some Wild West illustrations for a game book, I plan to focus on the comic story.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks. I downloaded the 30 day trial.
Fotosketcher is really becoming my go-to post thing.
Which is, again, funny, because it's free and other similar things I have I actually spent money on.
yes it's so good you could buy him a cup of coffee (or two) :) great effect in this one
More Carrara stuff. Investigating Pan today, I'm not sure how to use the primitive passes (the hair ones) in post. Any ideas welcome. :)
I know that you posted this a few days ago, but it took a while for me to watch it and have it soak in. JOHNGARRETT, thank you for making such an excellent video on making comics by compositing renders in Photoshop. Even though I am primarily a Carrara user these days, the general approach that you advocated is transferrable to other software. I know DS very well and followed along easily. You are right, it is easy to get lost on a tangent, and your very specific instructions kept it all on track. Very well done!
Thanks, @UnifiedBrain! I'm glad you found some time to go through it and it actually helped you.
I know you and @head wax are using Carrara...is it super-similar to Daz? I've never even tried it, but is it related to Daz in a "Poser" kind of way?
Here's a Sam Wilson: Captain America piece from earlier this year.
Initially I wasn't a fan of this replacement (honestly, I'm not usually a fan of hyped-up character replacements across the board), but I gave it a chance and I came to really enjoy it.
The costume was a complete PITA to make. The Genesis supersuit has so many surfaces that it becomes a pain to make some of your textures cross over the UV's and line up correctly. Even the "Basic Suit" has issues. I finally became so frustrated that I created a new UV set in Blender and loaded that in to solve the problem.
Next, I modeled the wings, harness, belt buckle and goggles in Blender. None of these were difficult, but I found rigging the wings in Daz to be quite the exercise in frustration. Despite the two guides I bought from Daz, I really couldn't get them to move and deform the way I wanted. They worked "well enough", but not like I had planned.
The rest of the outfit is some Luthbel Future Wilderness stuff and Treadz boots. The city is mostly Stonemason Urban Sprawl 2&3 buildings, with maybe an odd Google Warehouse building thrown in.
I rendered the color image out of Daz using 3Delight, and to get the lines I used Blender Freestyle - which in my opinion is the best option out there to get professional looking lines for your 3D scenes (without hiring an actual inker).
Freestyle definitely has a learning curve, and is tough on your computer's processor, but the results are worth the effort.
I grabbed the logo from the marvel.wikia.com site. Usually I'll recreate these logos in vector format in Illustrator, but this time I didn't think I wanted to do all that lol. By the time I got finished I didn't have it in me.
Anyway, you can see the amount of Photoshop postwork from the original renders to the final file. It's not really that much for this one. I try not to rely too heavily on the postwork, but it does always require some.
This one was actually fairly difficult and frustrating, but I'm glad I stuck with it.
Very nice.
Hey all. I could use some feedback. Attached are some concepts for that graphic novel I keep toying with. This will be my main character/team leader. This is a sci-fi team of merc/heros story. The 1st two pictures are using a G1M. The only difference between them is the skin shader. Picture 1 ia Visual Style Shaders and Picture 2 is Hiro 4 skin.
Picture 3 is G2M with a different toon shader for the skin. I tried putting both outfits on the G2M but it wouldn't work. Too much poke through. Let me know what you think about the different skin shaders as well as the different stle outfits. I'm going for a Buck Rodgers/Flash Gordon/Star Lord vibe.
Here are 2 more, playing around with Visual Style Shader skin.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the answer is yes. Over the years, Daz made Carrara compatable with Studio in just about every way. Carrara can load, clothe, pose and render most Daz and Poser content. Coming from a DS background, it took me about two months to get used to doing the same basic clothe/pose functions in Carrara. But after that minor learning curve, the fun began. Carrara has robust tools built-in for hair, terrain, plants clouds, fire, particles, text, ocean, and replicators. It has a built-in NPR render engine, Toon plugin (and several other 3rd party NPR plugins also available), and multipass render capability second to none.
For me, all that was gravy. I went with Carrara mostly because of it's animation and modeling tools.
Yeah, it sounds like a sales pitch. So be it. I'm a happy camper right now.
Extremely well done. Yeah, that supersuit can be a pain to use. Worth the effort!
I prefer the first G1M to the second one because the latter one appears to have an orange light/cast. The G2M is good, but it is more photorealistic than the G1M, comparatively speaking.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure if that orangle is due to my lighting or the skin shader (Hiro4). I used the same light on both. Maybe Hiro 4 skin doesn't work well on G1. What do think about the different outfits?
Both outfits look good. The first one (red jacket) has a more definite "old school" look to it. I personally don't love the bagginess of the pants, at the knees - but that is part of the look, so it works with the outfit. I like the second outfit better, but as noted, the first one feels more like Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon.
Without a doubt, I like the first one with the simple shaders. I think it has the coolest "retro vibe" that you said you're going for. As others have noted, the other textures offer too much photorealism for this type of render. This is a good character design. Nice and heroic looking. But I have a few thoughts, and concerns.
First of all, I love the color choices (the black is perfect because it is dark, but lets us see the details).
DETAILS: Those sharp shoulders are perfection on an outfit like this. The zipper actually makes it look like something a guy could actually wear. And those BOOTS! LOVE 'EM!
But... this looks like a Rob Liefeld chracter design from the 1990s, what with all the pouches and the pads. I'm getting late 90s comic from this, not Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers. However... I wouldn't toss the concept entirely. If you could change the belt (or nix the pouches) and ditch the side ribbing texture lines, this could fit into your time period. Even with the edits I've suggested here, I think I would still prefer the other concept, but this outfit could be modified for another character or work as a uniform for bad guys chasing the heroes.
Just some thoughts. I'm looking forward to seeing more!
Sorry for not being able to write more today, but I'm on a deadline and my break is almost over.
I'm IMPRESSED with the results you got from Blender. So much so, that I will look into it as an option for some of my 3D digital inking needs. And thank you so much for posting the line render by itself. Were the thick lines on top of the wings an artifact of the process, or did you make them darker on purpose? I'm asking because I'm curious about how much control you have over that option? I'm a big fan of the Live Comic Book Preview in Poser 11 (especially the ability to assign different line weights to different materials, as well as the ability to see subtle shadow changes in real time), but it only creates lines of a single width, and doesn't add contour like we're seeing here on the curve of his wings.
Thanks again for sharing the details of your process, and you did an outstanding job with this illustration, especially the composition of framing him between the buildings in the background.
Great character designs. I like the postwork you applied to them both, although I think the shadow doesn't work with either treatment. It just looks like a Photoshop effect, whereas the other treatments look like illustrations. Sorry, but breaktime is over, so I gotta run. I'll try to swing back by later and give it some thought as to how to address your "hairy problem."
As a treatment, I like it a lot. The composition is also good; without the layering I don't think we would get a sense of depth.
I'm not in love with the pose, though... The hand is awkwardly placed.
LOVE the treatment, though. Will you be using this in any of your pro work?
I think the hand might look better if the figure was angled differently or with a different effect.
As for pro work, it depends! So far my gigs have been surprisingly diverse in what customers want; several rpg companies wanted photorealistic stuff, which surprised me.
I have Blender but find it difficult to use. I'm confused about something, did you import the models into blender to use Freestyle or did you use it on your daz render? I'm assuming you imported the buildings into Blender. Sorry for being such a noob.
That is odd, indeed. Almost every company I know wants to stay away from anything that even remotely looks like it was created with 3D software.
Thank you very much for the detailed feedback. I actually have some of Liefeld's early stuff from the 1990's, like the 1st appearances of Cable and Deadpool. I use to collect the New Mutants and X-force. I had to give it up when I went away to college, but now I'm reading the new Cable series that just started this month. I know I'm dating myself here.
Anyway, I didn't like the original skin shader at first, but the more I look at it, the more I realize I was wrong. I do like the G2M shader as well, but I'm limited by only 1 skin type. VSS has several. My team of 7 is pretty international with 1 alien. I did think the gun was big. Would be perfect for Cable, but mybe not this guy. I could swap out the big gun for the other one. I have several guns to choose from. I used the belt with the pouches to cover up an issue with the holster LOL. I'll take your feeback into account and play around some more. You've given me some ideas. Thanks.
The jacket came from joequick’s"Golden Age for Daz's M4." It's part of the overall package.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/73674/gallery/11/Poser/Golden-Age-for-Dazs-M4
I used auto-fit to put it on the G1M. It's real basic and you have to add your own textures/colors, but I like the look of it. P.S. the belt with the pouches came from here as well.
thanks , another good call with said shadow :) I left those images you asked for in the Carrara forum btw - the link is in a message :)
Here's another treatment of Carrara passes. It's PhilW's Sopwith Camel - restructured.
Using Waterlogue app amongst others.
Thanks @mmitchell_houston!
And for you and @tkdrobert, I would definitely, wholeheartedly recommend investing some time into learning Freestyle. Some of the renders I've seen over on the Blender forums are straight up ridiculous in how natural they look.
Those thick lines on top of the wings were a natural effect of using what's called the "Along Stroke" modifier in my Freestyle Line Style options. This lets me use a curve to control how thick or thin the line can become, and where along the curve the thickness happens. I had adjusted the curve quite a bit by the time I got this result and I really liked it so I stuck with that.
I can also use a "Distance from Camera" modifier to make the lines thinner (or thicker) depending on how far away they are from the camera. Just like the Along Stroke modifier, I can use a curve or also linear values.
You can do a lot more than that, too. Especially if you get into the scripting, some incredible effects seen over on the Blender Artists forums.
As for how I did it, I used the McTeleBlender script to quickly export my entire scene, buildings and all, out to Blender, and set up the Freestyle render from there. McTeleBlender exports the scene with the camera, lights, render settings and materials as close as possible to how they were in Daz.
Freestyle is an open source renderer that you technically could use as a stand-alone renderer, but even the developers recommend that you use the Blender version.
There's some good videos here and there on YouTube, but I actually bought the Freestyle Level Up course from the guys at the BlenderNPR website. You can see a trailer for it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs99cYiO4KY
The course is about 3 years old, but it still holds up. It cost me about $30 (U.S.) and it was well worth it.
If you want to get into Blender itself (which I also recommend), some of the free beginner tutorials from Andrew Price (blenderguru.com) are really good, but I would suggest subscribing to the CG Cookie site (cgcookie.com/learn-blender/), because their courses are really tightly structured, and the path from beginner to intermediate to advanced is clearly laid out. These guys know how to teach!
Anyway just let me know if you have any more questions.
Loving it.
Thank you for the info.
thanks for that, it was a struggle till I tipped it in the diagonal and then it fell together - after five hours :)