Yea, its actually Cookie head and Genesis body (shaped close to cookie proportions), so that I have more clothes options.
I also have 3 of your geometry shell freebies going on there, one for Genesis body, one for Cookie Head and one for Hair.
Those geometry shells slow down the render though :( Without those, the render is super-fast!
Yeah, the reason for that is due to the ray tests it has to do. Without those ray tests, the GeoShell won't work with UberEnvironment Ambient Occlusion or Raytraced shadows (as in, the shell will actually cast a shadow around the entire character and make them look darker).
I should probably see if I can somehow make those raytests optional, so that you can turn off the unneeded ones and gain back some render speed...
Anyone have any good thoughts on toon backgrounds? I tried using these on a few tree props I have , but often they use transparencies on the leaves, and it really slows the renders. I was hoping to get a faster render with these shaders applied to them, but forgot that the trans-maps slows down renders, :(
I also tried cartoon-izing some backgrounds, like used on a environment sphere, but I did not get real good results.
I was trying to get a toon forest look...that renders fast, and matches the VSS look
You could try turning off the ambient occlusion for those background objects. You can do that by setting the Max Distance to something small like 0.1, but NOT 0. Turns out that one of the numerous Daz updates since then changed how the Max Distance works, so setting it to 0 will actually cause the entire surface to be covered in the ambient occlusion colour (in the case of the noir shaders, it causes them to go completely white).
Excellent, I dropped that to 0.1 (this alone cut time in half), and also dropped occlusion samples to 1 (adding this dropped it to negligible render time), and that thing rendered super-fast, and looks the same! :) Thanks for the tip!
Just for an example, this was a 20sec render for just the figure. Its only a 30 second render with a ground plane, 11 large bushes and a skydome :) Exactly what I was after!!!
UPDATE: What does that occlusion buy me in the render? I dropped it for the figure as well, and I'm down to a 17 second render with no apparent difference in how it looks?
My first attempt at the Noir style,
I'm a Carrara user, so Daz shader was a challenge for me.
I'm a little puzzled though, with each of the Noir presets, I had to change the "Dark Occlusion" to black ( which took me a while to figure out.) Otherwise the figures would come out stark white.
I thought it would just be drag and drop.
Oh well, still had a great time experimenting in Daz.
My first attempt at the Noir style,
I'm a Carrara user, so Daz shader was a challenge for me.
I'm a little puzzled though, with each of the Noir presets, I had to change the "Dark Occlusion" to black ( which took me a while to figure out.) Otherwise the figures would come out stark white.
I thought it would just be drag and drop.
Oh well, still had a great time experimenting in Daz.
Yeah unfortunately it seems that one of the more recent updates to Daz Studio ended up changing how the Occlusion parameters work, which ends up causing some bugs with the noir shaders. The issue is with the "Max Distance" parameter, and can be easily fixed by changing the number from 0 to something small like 0.01 .
My first attempt at the Noir style,
I'm a Carrara user, so Daz shader was a challenge for me.
I'm a little puzzled though, with each of the Noir presets, I had to change the "Dark Occlusion" to black ( which took me a while to figure out.) Otherwise the figures would come out stark white.
I thought it would just be drag and drop.
Oh well, still had a great time experimenting in Daz.
Thanks, its just a test of hair models to find out if one will work with these shaders or not. That is Reby Sky Elite hair, which works well with the shaders for a nice toon effect.
Thanks, its just a test of hair models to find out if one will work with these shaders or not. That is Reby Sky Elite hair, which works well with the shaders for a nice toon effect.
Oh, I see.
I went crazy and bought a lot of the fibermesh hairs when they were on sale a few weeks ago. That's the hair I enjoy using the most with toon shaders. I remove the opacity map, if they have any, and they work great. (I do understand that fibermesh hair is not always the correct style to use, mainly with anime style characters.)
I have seen a lot of comics threads lately and one of the questions I always come away with is: why, with these great toon shaders available, are most still churning out 3D-style comics/images only? Is it laziness because these have to be applied to every object in the scene? Hmm....
Not sure what the Cast Outline shader is...but how I use a Geometry Shell, is to (1) select the figure (2) create a new geometry shell & parent to figure (3) select the geometry shell, and on surfaces, select all surfaces (4) double-click and apply the geometry shell freebie in fist page of this thread. In the render above the gal on the left had a Geom Shell, the right did not...
Not sure what the Cast Outline shader is...but how I use a Geometry Shell, is to (1) select the figure (2) create a new geometry shell & parent to figure (3) select the geometry shell, and on surfaces, select all surfaces (4) double-click and apply the geometry shell freebie in fist page of this thread. In the render above the gal on the left had a Geom Shell, the right did not...
I am using Daz 4.6.1.33, no issues
crashed in the mac pub beta but 4.6.1 worked.
What's the difference between Geometry Shell and Node Instance?
Not sure what the Cast Outline shader is...but how I use a Geometry Shell, is to (1) select the figure (2) create a new geometry shell & parent to figure (3) select the geometry shell, and on surfaces, select all surfaces (4) double-click and apply the geometry shell freebie in fist page of this thread. In the render above the gal on the left had a Geom Shell, the right did not...
I am using Daz 4.6.1.33, no issues
crashed in the mac pub beta but 4.6.1 worked.
What's the difference between Geometry Shell and Node Instance?
The shell is meant to cover a model, and you can adjust the thickness.
A node instance is meant to be a clone, so you can move it about wherever you want (but you can't adjust it's thickness).
Not sure what the Cast Outline shader is...but how I use a Geometry Shell, is to (1) select the figure (2) create a new geometry shell & parent to figure (3) select the geometry shell, and on surfaces, select all surfaces (4) double-click and apply the geometry shell freebie in fist page of this thread. In the render above the gal on the left had a Geom Shell, the right did not...
I am using Daz 4.6.1.33, no issues
crashed in the mac pub beta but 4.6.1 worked.
What's the difference between Geometry Shell and Node Instance?
The shell is meant to cover a model, and you can adjust the thickness.
A node instance is meant to be a clone, so you can move it about wherever you want (but you can't adjust it's thickness).
I'd be curious to see how those fibermesh hairs render with the VSS shaders? Do you have some render examples posted anywhere?
EDIT: Maybe laziness, maybe they just like the look? The reduced render times far outweighs the shader application, IMO.
I should have been clearer, my intentions are to use the fibermesh hair with the manga style shaders. I did several tests and they all turned out better than I thought.
Here is something I just did to show how they look rendered with the Manga Style Shaders. I don't have a better example for you at the moment.
I suspect that for the Visual Style Shaders they may not look as good, someone else will have to render some examples to show.
This is going to sound like a stupid question (probably because it is), but how do you remove the visual style effect from an item?
I was using the Genesis Cloak and applied the visual shaders to different parts (as an experiment). Then I decided for a different look and wanted the original textures/colors back. The cloak is already posed in a position I want so reloading is out of the question.
I thought I could just select the whole cloak in the editor and re-applying the original texture maps to all the parts would do it, but I must be doing something wrong because even though I manually selected all the parts of the cloak in the surface editor and the content panes, the prop is till showing some of the menu items from the visual style shaders and it does not render well.
Is there a hard reset somewhere to remove the Visual Shader effect completely?
I thought I could just select the whole cloak in the editor and re-applying the original texture maps to all the parts would do it, but I must be doing something wrong because even though I manually selected all the parts of the cloak in the surface editor and the content panes, the prop is till showing some of the menu items from the visual style shaders and it does not render well.
Until someone supplies an answer, you could just:
1) Load up a second cloak over the figure, select the first cloak (the one with the VSS shaders) and then Edit/Copy Figure.
2) You will then apply the pose from this cloak to the new one, by selecting the second cloak and applying the pose with the Edit/Paste/Paste Figure Pose.
3) Then delete the cloak with the VSS shaders and you are done.
Or
Another way of doing this will be to save a Pose Preset of the current cloak and then apply that pose preset to the new one.
I believe there are two ways to apply this pose preset, you can just drag the pose preset file over the new cloak, or use the File/Merge command to apply the pose preset (make sure you have the cloak selected).
You must be a mind-reader because that was going to be my next question (I was pretty sure I've done that before but couldn't remember how I did it). Thanks. I'd still be interested in knowing if removing the VSS (or resetting the object to it's original state) is possible.
When I have applied to to V4 or A4 or some other character's skin, and I want to reset...re-applying the old skin has always worked. It may be the way the creator crafted the pz2 or whatever file is applying the original, that it does not expect to need to change everything?
Comments
Looking good. :D I never owned Cookie myself, but she does have a nice face for toon shading.
Yea, its actually Cookie head and Genesis body (shaped close to cookie proportions), so that I have more clothes options.
I also have 3 of your geometry shell freebies going on there, one for Genesis body, one for Cookie Head and one for Hair.
Those geometry shells slow down the render though :( Without those, the render is super-fast!
Yeah, the reason for that is due to the ray tests it has to do. Without those ray tests, the GeoShell won't work with UberEnvironment Ambient Occlusion or Raytraced shadows (as in, the shell will actually cast a shadow around the entire character and make them look darker).
I should probably see if I can somehow make those raytests optional, so that you can turn off the unneeded ones and gain back some render speed...
That would be awesome! :)
Chip looks pretty good as well!
Anyone have any good thoughts on toon backgrounds? I tried using these on a few tree props I have , but often they use transparencies on the leaves, and it really slows the renders. I was hoping to get a faster render with these shaders applied to them, but forgot that the trans-maps slows down renders, :(
I also tried cartoon-izing some backgrounds, like used on a environment sphere, but I did not get real good results.
I was trying to get a toon forest look...that renders fast, and matches the VSS look
You could try turning off the ambient occlusion for those background objects. You can do that by setting the Max Distance to something small like 0.1, but NOT 0. Turns out that one of the numerous Daz updates since then changed how the Max Distance works, so setting it to 0 will actually cause the entire surface to be covered in the ambient occlusion colour (in the case of the noir shaders, it causes them to go completely white).
Excellent, I dropped that to 0.1 (this alone cut time in half), and also dropped occlusion samples to 1 (adding this dropped it to negligible render time), and that thing rendered super-fast, and looks the same! :) Thanks for the tip!
Just for an example, this was a 20sec render for just the figure. Its only a 30 second render with a ground plane, 11 large bushes and a skydome :) Exactly what I was after!!!
UPDATE: What does that occlusion buy me in the render? I dropped it for the figure as well, and I'm down to a 17 second render with no apparent difference in how it looks?
My first attempt at the Noir style,
I'm a Carrara user, so Daz shader was a challenge for me.
I'm a little puzzled though, with each of the Noir presets, I had to change the "Dark Occlusion" to black ( which took me a while to figure out.) Otherwise the figures would come out stark white.
I thought it would just be drag and drop.
Oh well, still had a great time experimenting in Daz.
Yeah unfortunately it seems that one of the more recent updates to Daz Studio ended up changing how the Occlusion parameters work, which ends up causing some bugs with the noir shaders. The issue is with the "Max Distance" parameter, and can be easily fixed by changing the number from 0 to something small like 0.01 .
I like it a lot!
Bishounen Taurus,
The fact that you still support your products in the forums, builds trust in buying your other products. You do a great job, thank you.
Eustace Scrub,
Thank you! I learned a lot, the next one should be much better!
A pic of a few characters I made using these awesome Visual Style shaders! An anime-ish Psylocke and Powergirl.
Very nice! I, especially, like the way the brunette came out.
Thanks, its just a test of hair models to find out if one will work with these shaders or not. That is Reby Sky Elite hair, which works well with the shaders for a nice toon effect.
Oh, I see.
I went crazy and bought a lot of the fibermesh hairs when they were on sale a few weeks ago. That's the hair I enjoy using the most with toon shaders. I remove the opacity map, if they have any, and they work great. (I do understand that fibermesh hair is not always the correct style to use, mainly with anime style characters.)
I have seen a lot of comics threads lately and one of the questions I always come away with is: why, with these great toon shaders available, are most still churning out 3D-style comics/images only? Is it laziness because these have to be applied to every object in the scene? Hmm....
I'd be curious to see how those fibermesh hairs render with the VSS shaders? Do you have some render examples posted anywhere?
EDIT: Maybe laziness, maybe they just like the look? The reduced render times far outweighs the shader application, IMO.
I DL'd the Cast Outline shader (thanks!).
Is there any docs on how geoshell works and does this all work in DS 4.6?
Not sure what the Cast Outline shader is...but how I use a Geometry Shell, is to (1) select the figure (2) create a new geometry shell & parent to figure (3) select the geometry shell, and on surfaces, select all surfaces (4) double-click and apply the geometry shell freebie in fist page of this thread. In the render above the gal on the left had a Geom Shell, the right did not...
I am using Daz 4.6.1.33, no issues
crashed in the mac pub beta but 4.6.1 worked.
What's the difference between Geometry Shell and Node Instance?
crashed in the mac pub beta but 4.6.1 worked.
What's the difference between Geometry Shell and Node Instance?
The shell is meant to cover a model, and you can adjust the thickness.
A node instance is meant to be a clone, so you can move it about wherever you want (but you can't adjust it's thickness).
At least, those are the intended uses for them.
The shell is meant to cover a model, and you can adjust the thickness.
A node instance is meant to be a clone, so you can move it about wherever you want (but you can't adjust it's thickness).
At least, those are the intended uses for them.
thanks for the clarification!
I should have been clearer, my intentions are to use the fibermesh hair with the manga style shaders. I did several tests and they all turned out better than I thought.
Here is something I just did to show how they look rendered with the Manga Style Shaders. I don't have a better example for you at the moment.
I suspect that for the Visual Style Shaders they may not look as good, someone else will have to render some examples to show.
Yea, those do look good with the Manga shaders.
Well, I splurged and paid $5 for Anime Doll by Studio Maya. She looks good in Visual Style Shading! :)
(Note: This is A4 body)
This is going to sound like a stupid question (probably because it is), but how do you remove the visual style effect from an item?
I was using the Genesis Cloak and applied the visual shaders to different parts (as an experiment). Then I decided for a different look and wanted the original textures/colors back. The cloak is already posed in a position I want so reloading is out of the question.
I thought I could just select the whole cloak in the editor and re-applying the original texture maps to all the parts would do it, but I must be doing something wrong because even though I manually selected all the parts of the cloak in the surface editor and the content panes, the prop is till showing some of the menu items from the visual style shaders and it does not render well.
Is there a hard reset somewhere to remove the Visual Shader effect completely?
Until someone supplies an answer, you could just:
1) Load up a second cloak over the figure, select the first cloak (the one with the VSS shaders) and then Edit/Copy Figure.
2) You will then apply the pose from this cloak to the new one, by selecting the second cloak and applying the pose with the Edit/Paste/Paste Figure Pose.
3) Then delete the cloak with the VSS shaders and you are done.
Or
Another way of doing this will be to save a Pose Preset of the current cloak and then apply that pose preset to the new one.
I believe there are two ways to apply this pose preset, you can just drag the pose preset file over the new cloak, or use the File/Merge command to apply the pose preset (make sure you have the cloak selected).
You must be a mind-reader because that was going to be my next question (I was pretty sure I've done that before but couldn't remember how I did it). Thanks. I'd still be interested in knowing if removing the VSS (or resetting the object to it's original state) is possible.
When I have applied to to V4 or A4 or some other character's skin, and I want to reset...re-applying the old skin has always worked. It may be the way the creator crafted the pz2 or whatever file is applying the original, that it does not expect to need to change everything?