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@3doutlaw Thanks, amigo. I'll check out AoA's shader then. I appreciate the rapid response! Merry Valentine's.
@darthreed, that's a great style you're producing. I'm moving toward 3DOutlaw's blue-bathing-suited girl bac a few posts, but really like all of the variations that are happenning in here! great work!
--ms
Any chance, we'll get an update to this product? I've been using the crap out of it. One of my favorites. You can check out my gallery under Super Heros to see what I've done with it. One of my top buys.
It's me again! I'm tilting with the Manga Style Shaders now, since I couldn't really get Sketchy to where I wanted it to be (yet)--at least I can get closer (faster) with MSS today. It seems like the settings I've picked after watching Gonna be an Oak's video aren't respecting the lighting or aren't shading or the paper tone is washing out everything else. Fiddled with all of them, but couldn't find a combination among the infinite set that worked on my own.
I'm focusing on the skin for now (the hair and the armor are suffering the same sort of issues). I don't want a screentone, and I suspect that my lack of understanding of the screentone parameters is part of my problem.
This is the base G8F with one distant light. All textures have been removed and the base blank MS shader applied. The preset file is here in Dropbox if you want to see all of the various settings in the state I'm currently in. My goal is to get as close as I can without textures and other pre/post-work.
Any ideas why I'm only getting the diffuse/tone 1 color for the skin? The same shade is used for Diffuse - Tint, Tone 1 - Shade, Colour - Paper, and Colour Tone 1, but I'm not sure which one is overriding all the other tones. The screen tones are all set to 0%, but if I set paper to white or black, then the skin is shaded white or black respectively, so I clearly don't understand the interations between the parameters.
At this point, I'll take any suggestions that y'all've got.
Ah, the tone colours aren't used to actually colour the surface, hence why they're labeled as "shades" rather than colours. They're meant to tell the shader how dark you want the screentone effect to be (with the diffuse tint being where you'll usually put the diffuse texture).
You see, Manga Style is by default a black and white screentone shader. It takes all colour information from the surface and converts it into a black and white screentone. This is to emulate the look of typical Japanese comics/manga. The shader comes with some optional parameters to apply basic colours to the screentone effect so that you can get a classic pop art effect.
I think the main problem here is that you've applied the exact same colour to the "Colour - Paper" (usually white) and the "Colour - Tone 1" (usually black). It's like drawing on white paper using a white crayon, nothing is going to show. Also, by using such similar shades of the same colour in the "Tone - Shade" parameters (and giving them all the exact same strength), you're not going to get any pronounced shading in general.
My advice is to read the documentation/reference guide posted on the first page of this topic (hopefully the link still works). That includes explanations of all the parameters and what they do, as well as some images to demonstrate.
I hope this helped!
OK, that was very helpful. Thank you. I didn't glean that nuance from the settings guide or the step-by-step. I think what you're saying is that the Shade parameters work like a mask. The Colour parameters provide the underlying color. I had it backwards in my head. That gets me a lot closer to where I want to be!
However, I think, if I understand what you're saying, I can't get all the way to where I want to be with MSS.
By zeroing out the Shade parameters (updated preset), I get two tones where I'm expecting 4.
When I apply the partial preset to be more like a quad (Partial Presets\Shading Presets\Contrast\Shade - Light), it seems to do what I would expect and only changes the Shade parameters to mask in the different Colour parameters, but instead of nice bands of color, I get polkadots.
So, is it "You can't get there from here with MSS?" (i.e. to something like the the toon shader in the preview window which at least shows me where I would generally expect the bands of different tones) or "You're still missing a vital clue (or seven)?" I'm hoping it's the latter, since I like the way the MSS parameters are laid out, but I'm also willing to be told that I'm using the wrong tool for the job and I should go spend more time with one of the other shader packs that I also own: AoA, Sketchy, pwToon, VSS, etc. (Yes, I have a little OCD.
Why do you ask?)
I'm sorry, but I don't think Manga Style is what you're looking for. As you can see from the promo images, Manga Studio is specifically designed to output patterned images (mainly of the black and white variety). As the name suggests, it's to emulate the style of Japanese manga, which uses predominantly "polkadot" screentone patterns.
(An image from Wikipedia illustrating screentones.)
The colouring options were added as a way to create basic pop-art/golden-age comic style images, such as the works of Lichtenstein.
Unfortunately your pictures won't seem to load, but it sounds like you just want regular toon shading with four tones. You'll find it very difficult to get a regular toon look using Manga Style, as it wasn't designed to make regular toon images.
Fortunately for you, one already comes for free in Daz Studio. The default Daz Toon shader, found under Shader Presets/DS Defaults, is a basic cel-shader that allows you to choose how many "divisions" the shading has, with the number being infinite. There are multiple versions of the Daz Toon shader (glossy, metal, matte, skin, etc), the main difference being the specular highlight.
Anyways, I hope this helps!
Got it. Thanks for the education and clarification. I appreciate having PAs who're so responsive! I'll go fiddle with the others some more, including the defaults (which I wasn't terribly happy with last time I fiddled with them).
PWToon, for 3dl, is my favorite cartoon shader, but I prefer LineRender9000 for the lining
Thanks for volunteering to answer all of my upcoming questions, William.
LR9k seems OK for basic fine-tip type outlining, but nothing darker or deeper, since it can't interact with the color shader. But I'll worry about that when I find the color mix I'm looking for. pwToon and I are not yet friends. . . nor are VSS nor the dzToon* shaders, though, either. AoA's subsurface toon skin promos, like always, are sexy, but I have yet to find many PA's who bother to document pricisely how they sculpted their work in the first place. That's a readme that I'd pay extra for. 
TheNathanParable at least provides great presets that are easy to produce quick results that look a lot like his promos. (I've just been trying to do something entirely different with them.)
Hey all, what VSS skin texture would you use for an Asian character (Japanese, Chinese, Korean)? Peach, Pink or Tan? Manga women all look white to me.
This chart I pinned for my own reference isn't really an answer, but it's what I've got for you. I suppose you could lay those up against the RGB values of the Fitzpatrick Scale or whatever set of parameters you choose, if you're looking for "racial purity" or some such. Traditional black-and-white manga make most every skin tone white to simplify the art and reduce the ink load, but in your case with infinite color possibilities, you've got a different set of constraints. At least in the US, most folks are afraid of the political correctness police who will descend upon them if they generalize anything like skin color and race together. . .
You could just poke some reference photos of some representative folks you aim to anime-ize with an eyedropper and pick the shades you like. (I can't recall seeing any peach or pink people--not counting my pasty Scots-Irish self when I get "just a little sunburned." But, hey, it's anime. Why not have peach people with puce hair? Heh.)
Since there's so much real world variation within every ethnicity, I think you should always pick the palette that serves your character and from then on just remain consistent.
HTH!
Thanks for the info. I'm really just trying to do modern American style comics.
Doing some experimentation with the Manga shaders. Starting to really like them.
Just a heads up. The VSS skins can be converted to IRAY if you want to use the alien and fantacy skins. Just use the IRAY Uber shader after you have applied the VSS skin.
I think all that does is just transfer the diffuse colour over, and that it won't retain the toon look that VSS was designed to achieve through 3Delight.
I just really want to make it clear that Visual Style and Manga Style were not designed to work in Iray, and attempting to use them in Iray will not give the intended results.
Your right of course. I just wanted people to know that you could use the shaders for other than what they were intended for. Below is an example of a render I did with the skin shader in Iray with post work.
Wow, what an excellent resource. Thanks!
I'm not going through 15 pages to see if those files that are in the first post have been replaced with other links, so sorry if they're somewhere buried in the thread and I'm not aware. The Freebies such as the outliner have dead links. Have you got those somewhere in the thread, or can you please repost those and give us the proper links?
Sorry about that. I think Dropbox changed the way they handle filesharing recently, which means all the old Dropbox links are dead. I'll try and get that fixed soon when I get the chance.
Thank you so much! Appreciate it.
Have you considered making a ShareCG account and sharing it there. You'd have more control over it and it would be easier for people to find.
That sounds like a cool idea, i'll have to consider that. :)
I also really love how well the shaders do cell shading on figures with hand drawn facial textures.
I feel like I could make my own Kemono Friends renders with it.
Alright guys, I finally got around to looking into the whole Dropbox thing, and fortunately it turns out the new system ain't that different. The main change is that now you can rename and reorganise your files without breaking any download links to them (though of course you do have the option to remove a file's download link if you want to stop sharing said file).
I've gone through and generated new download links for all the files, so hopefully they should all be working now!
@TheNathanParable, love VSS and GSO. I'm getting pretty close to the NPR result I want after lots of experimentation, but I'm unable to sort out a way to put an image on top of either successfully. I realize I may have to go beat my head on LIE some more to figure it out or resign myself to postwork, but I figured I'd ask the experts in here.
I've got a set of black and white presets for VSS with GSO on top of them to provide more predictable outlines for some things since they render waaay faster than LR9k. I want to put tattoos and other geometry hugging details on top of those.
But when I put the PNGs on diffuse light/dark channels, the non-transparent areas just get rendered as black boxes, even though there's transparency inside the affected area. There doesn't seem to be a logical channel on GSO to put one, and the standard shader doesn't seem to have a convenient way to be invisible while still putting a material image overlay on.
(Yes, I'm probably using all the wrong words to describe the various surface properties. Apologies for my under-development Daz vocabulary.)
Thought I'd give pwToon shader a crack... I haven't used in a year or two. Anyway, I've been having problems rendering some clothing items and especially hair applied to the G3F figure "I haven't yet tried other figures".
I got the clothes to work but the hair is another matter, it doesn't matter what hair it is... the result is always the same. It makes the figure's skin, et all, faint while all the items applied to the figure render fine with the pwToon shader.
I thought maybe the version of DAZ Studio (4.9.1.117 or something something) that I had installed was the culprit so I uninstalled it and installed the latest version (4.9.4.122). Nope, its still there.
Anyway, I am stumped but if anyone has any ideas what it could be... please let me know. Also, I've noticed that some lights will trigger the problem whether the hair is present too.
@Wistfultiger I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do, but most shaders in Daz Studio don't support transparency in PNGs by default. It's usually expected for you to use a seperate Opacity Map if you want something to be transparent. Maybe you could try editing the PNG so it has an opaque white background and then using that instead. Could you show us a picture of your work, so we could see the error?
@Mardook Unfortunately pwToon isn't my product (my products are Visual Style and Manga Style), so I don't think I can be much help. I have absolutely no idea why pwToon is doing that. What's especially weird is that it doesn't seem to be the normal type of transparency (where you can see the eyeballs and the inside of the mouth through the head), but instead it seems to be the more advanced ghost effect that you'd get with pwGhost. Do you have pwGhost installed? Maybe there's some sort of conflict with the two shaders?
@TheNathanParable, here's a picture of what I'm trying to accomplish in the form of a tattoo. For VSS, the image just doesn't render at all for occlusion light/dark. The only property on GSO that I can put a texture on is transparency, and it doesn't work the way that I want to, of course.
@Wistfultiger You should be putting the texture into the Diffuse Light/Dark colours, not the Occlusion ones. Not only do the Noir shaders not use Occlusion, but Occlusion shadows only appear in crevices (such as the armpits or the nostrils).
Like I said, Daz Shaders don't typically support PNG textures with alpha. I believe what's happening is that it's displaying the PNG without the alpha, giving you the big blocky version that you're seeing. Load the texture into an image editor, add a white background, and then use that instead.