Non-photorealistic Renders (NPR)
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Looks like it could be on a greeting card as is - the contrast between the character and the textured BG works well together. I dig all the variations in hue, but still all green - excellent!
- Greg
Thanks Greg :)
Poking at _regular_ 3DL, used Stonemason's Dirt shader + Let it Snow: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Bronze-statue-in-the-snow-586749302
I've been playing with an NPR style for quite a while now. Been working more for a proper cartoon style inside of DAZ studio.
I've been debating cleaning my setup up and organizing as a DAZ product. It's basically an automation of multiple render passes with different effects, leveraging 3Delight for the lines.
I've attached an example. The compositing was done in GIMP.
digneo: VERY nice. This kinda reminds me of the classic animation shaders used back in the 1980s and 1990s. Very nice, indeed.
I just posted another NPR comic-style render, and would love some feedback on it.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/70312/wip-golden-age-superheroes
Sorry for making you guys click-thru to it, but I'm trying to keep the comments together in one place.
Thanks!
Hm, picture link in that thread is broken. =(
Regarding my toolset, the shading / coloring is however you want to do it. The product (if it gets to that point) is simply going to be a convenient way to generate the line art. In the above picture, I'm using Visual Style shaders trimmed down to just ambient color with a little bit of shading, mostly.
It appears that the image was linked from an attachment, but the attachment is no longer there, so the image link won't work
This looks great, djigneo! Are you interested in trying to do the compositing in DS?
- Greg
I've debated it, but I'm struggling to find a good reason to redevelop what Photoshop / GIMP and other programs do already (and better). Only thing would be a quick preview feature, but for production work, I sort of figure most artists would prefer the separate files so they can composite as they like.
At some point I think I may investigate some simple compositing in DS and if it's not too challenging work that in too. I've been rethinking my setup and trying to figure out how to make it more intuitive for others. At this point it's been just quick and dirty code to get everything to work for my uses.
I'll try and make some more images in different styles to demonstrate the diversity of my setup. It's pretty much the same in concept to yours, just more functionality inside DS from the sounds of it. (And no need to replace material shaders mostly, although that is totally supported as well.)
Have you looked at the RIB that DS exports to see if the "edgecolor" RiDisplay param is being processed properly? White is the default, so if there's something wrong with the output syntax, it's what the renderer reverts to.
I guess you do have the 3DL documentation, but it's here: https://3delight.atlassian.net/wiki/display/3DSP/Resources
No, but that would be the logical next step. That and figuring out how to get my render script to honor the Brick camera parameters. =)
Next time I'm in a tooling mood I'll have to see if I can figure those bits out, then I'd be in pretty good shape I think.
I suppose I should post my updates here, now that I'm back to 3DL...
New page in my webcomic: http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/53/
Thanks to @Mustakettu85's pointers, I figured out the Line color issue. Took a bit of fiddling... pretty much brute force, but I got it! You da man!
Thanks for the outline tip! Once I figured out I had to look at the Normal output, I was golden.
And it solves a bunch of problems I had with PWToon. Thank you all SO much... you are awesome.
I asked elsewhere, I'll ask here... are there any easy ways to generate outlines?
PWToon and the Geoshell outline shader has a problem with surfaces perpendicular to the angle of view (turning all black).
The Scripted 3Delight Outline tool is great, for Normal output... except facial features and similar end up really blobby and too thick.
Suggestions?
Ways, yes. Easy, no. At least not that my wee pea-sized brain has been able to figure out. We all know how convoluted my process is - woot!
- Greg
I'm having a little more success with PWToon. One thing I realized is that I hadn't properly been expanding and setting linethickness across ALL materials (I was getting really uneven results).
And it's a huge scene with LOTS of stuff in it
My product? About 6+ months ago I was where you were, struggling to get reasonable outlines for a toon style. Like you, I tried many things, including:
I eventually took matters into my own hands, and after a long, hard-fought battle I now have:
So, my current workflow is: A) Merge my camera scene subset into the scene B) Launch the multi-camera renderer script. C) Come back 5 minutes later, composite the images on top of each other with GIMP, export. Done. Beautiful thing is that it's completely shader independent, so you can use your choice of surfaces and renderer for the main color output, and just use 3Delight for the line output.
One of the problems with the Outline render script as you have noted is that there's not a good feedback loop for getting good lines, since it's unclear how it determines where the lines "should" be. So the approach I decided on with Camera shaders lets you see the output as it renders, so you can see where the differences in color are and thus can more accurately predict where the lines will show up.
After I started seeing what 3Delight saw when deciding to draw lines, things became much clearer. (I ended up switching to a "Fresnel" camera for my detail lines, because I thought it gave more reasonable results than "normal" lines, which is what the standard Outline render script uses.)
Do you have a link? :)
I redid my comic, happier with the result: http://thefarshoals.webcomic.ws/comics/53/
I had been going diffuse high/low of 0%, but while that's great for linearty stuff I'd worked with elsewhere, it didn't hold up to complex lighting. I ended up going with 50% - 0%, and also going through to get a more consistent line thickness. (There are LOTS of surfaces in that scene and I discovered I hadn't been properly getting them all so I ended up with somewhat ugly results)
No link, because it's not an official product yet. I'm currently in-development on some of the features. (Though what I said was working above indeed is working, so I think I've proven the concept and just need to clean things up and fix a few straggling items.) I only recently started moving towards cleaning it up for use. Hopefully before too long I'll be ready for some beta testers. (Assuming there's interest, which seemingly there is a need for this sort of thing.)
The Fresnel is one approach used in either Maya or Softimage (can't remember which) but both are said to have great NPR rendering for 3DL.
I wonder if I can do something with PWEffect. It's Phantasm effect ( http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/PWEffect-ghost-and-skeleton-closeup-586928821 ) is pretty cool.
Then again, looking at the results, it might suffer from the same 'perpendicular surface' issue. I'll have to play with it.
Huh. Looking pretty good... when I get it finished I'll link.
But PWEffects with Opacity and Ambient modifiers all set to Curvature (Inverse) creates a very nice outline with a slightly shaded look. (Ideally I'd want the shading completely off, but it still looks pretty cool)
Combined with a color pass using PWToon, it might work out quite nicely.
Hrm. I might be better off sticking with PWToon for the majority of what I'm doing, but this looks cool.
The problem is the workflow -- two separate files and renders, plus the first pass took almost 30 minutes to render... for a single character and outfit!
I used PWEffect with Curvature (inverted) for both opacity and ambient color. It does look pretty cool, though, so I may use it for specific images as the mood strikes me.
Fixed the link to the Golden Age image: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/70312/wip-golden-age-superheroes
I also added another image to this thread (so scroll to the bottom): http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/64940/wip-opinions-sought-on-comic-style-illustration#latest
Awesome =)
Have you tried playing with the edge-related parameters and filter width? Also enabling that "distance fade" can help - lines will become thinner when farther away. But it will mean playing with params more... It's not exactly the most user-friendly script in the world, true.
So I guess djigneo's upcoming one should be a much better choice eventually =)
Hah, speaking of that, I proved out the concept of getting the render script to support Shader camera parameters, and that was the last big feature. At this point it's just a bit of clean-up, then Beta testing!
Great news!
Must: I'll try playing with the parameters. The problem is wanting the outline of the character overall to be thick but the details around the face thin, and I don't know if there's an easy way for the script to tell that.
I'm also happy to see development continuing in the 3DL community -- I worried, coming back, that I'd be in a big echoing empty ruin... ;)