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Frankly, every shader has a little something, and Linerender is useful even if you do Iray for some of the lines.
But the art sketchiness of this is a lot of fun
I have Visual Syle Shaders which is nice once you figure it out, but it doesn't work with Iray. Also it can be labor intensive (also the texture issue). I use Photoshop CC for a lot of post work too. I sometimes do realistic renders, but I prefer comic book style (color, modern, not retro, see below). This product looks good but I've been disappointed in the past with some of my purchases. For those of you who have purchased already, was it worth the buy? Can any one post a comic book style picture like the one below?
A lot of Normal based art shaders (of which this is one) have a lot of problems placing lines along edges perpendicular to the camera (like a table top or whatnot).
So, that's still a problem, although, again, I've only seen a very few solutions that get around that.
Ultimately... not easily, I don't think. The cartoon cell shading style isn't something this really does, although you might be able to hammer around it with the two outlining elements.
I was always planning to try combining the VSS shaders with the Manga shaders in 3delight. I have both...this seemed a way to do it. I like the result! :)
It's not an exact science, but I did have a Spidey for M4 in my runtime, so I dropped it in, applied iray uber, base sketchy and default shader, and this is the turnout. Maybe it gives you an idea if its close enough. I did nothing else but hit render.
I'm glad to finally see some customer renders for this! Thanks everyone,
Something to keep in mind is that these shaders aren't going to "toonify" textures in any way, like something along the lines of a Photoshop plugin would. The general toon effect is all geometry based which is then more or less overlayed over the existing textures, so you're not going to get any toon edges on features coming from diffuse textures etc. You can however get texture based features by using normal or bump maps since these modify what the renderer sees as geometry. Doing so is more "advanced usage" since it can also kind of destroy the toon effect if your bump / normals contain too much detail to draw smooth lines over.
If you look at this render you can see what the bump maps are doing to the toon edge. It'll break it up and take it away from being a line, turning it more into a shading effect. In general if you're working with something that's already a toon figure like Star you won't have to worry about their bump maps doing this. If you're trying to toonify Michael 7 though and want to use his bump / normal maps you'll have to be careful if you don't want it turning into shading.
Adding the geometry with bump / normal maps can be useful when dealing with surfaces that don't like to produce the effect in ways you want. Eyes for example are spheres which will usually only show the effect on their outer edges (which on a character tends to be inside the eye socket). Using the eye's bump / normal maps will help draw toon lines on things like the veins or other features contained in the map. Using morphs like iris bulge can help with this too. The Project EYEris / EYEray sets come with morphs that modify the iris in other ways that might help get lines in an around that as well.
One other thing you can try (your mileage may very) is adding a solid color to the normal map slot and adjusting the strength. This will change the direction of the surface normal for the entire material, so you can theoretically make the renderer think that polygons facing sideways are facing the camera. If you have interactive renderer on while adjusting the strength of a solid color normal map you can see the toon line more or less rotating around the figure it's on. Push it too far though and you start to get geometry faceting errors (this is the main reason why I didn't include it as a feature within the product). You can push it further without issue by subdividing a heck of a lot. This trick will also muck up surface seams though (areas on things like Victoria where her torso texture lines up with her arms). So it works best on objects that are only made up of a single surface.
In any case if you want to push bump / normal maps to their limits you'll likely want to disable the value limits that are set on the shader. Since they do have the ability to ruin toon outline effects I have the strength limits for these values set to 20% or so just in case maps get auto loaded and produce some screwed up results for someone unfamiliar with what might be going on.
That's not bad. This is what I've done using Visual Stle Shaders with a little postwork using Poster Edges + Google Nix in PS. Rendered in 3Delight. This is what I'm going for.
Here is another one with a mix of VSS and normal textures.
Insta-buy for me :)
A couple new ones with RawArt's EleBeast for Genesis 3 Males.
Hi, can I just chime in and ask what is the benefit of using IRAY - a photo realistic render engine - to produce NPR?
Wouldn't this be paradoxical?
I guess you've got Sketchy upon IRAY versus (for example) Visual Style Shaders, pwToon (etc?) upon 3Delight and at the end of the day who cares what engine it runs on so long as you like the feature set, render times, ease of use, purchase price, resource requirements etc etc?
But maybe I'm just being extremely stupid and missing an obvious reason?
Feel free to illuminate me oh no wait that's a stupid pun DELETE DELETE
As more and more people discover 3D art, less and less will be familiar with 3Delight. Personally I've only used 3Delight one time. And it was a headache to try and figure out - the lighting and all was such a pain in the bottom, imo. Where as with Iray, I can load up a good HDRI and have nice lighting with no fuss no muss. To me, hand cuffing people who may want to create toon style renders to an older render engine that they may not be familiar with is kind of silly. I, for one, am extremely happy with Sketchy and am very very glad that it's for Iray. :)
Besides, there are already quite a few toon-style programs available for 3Delight - there wasn't, until now, a single option in the Daz store for people who don't use 3Delight. It's great that Iray users now have an option.
I would say the two major selling points of Iray versus something like 3Delight in this regard would be render speed and working in conjunction with other Iray materials. I have a top of the line CPU and it's never going to render 3Delight as fast as GPU power at the same price point renders Iray.
These toon effects are shader presets and can exist perfectly in the same scene as other Iray materials. You can have a fully detailed photorealistic scene powered by Iray with a completely non photorealistic character without the need for postwork. I usually leave things like the eye surface a water or glass like Iray Uber material to keep reflections around which is a simple use case, but I imagine there's a lot of unique ways multiple materials can be used in the same scene. A toon character behind some frosted glass may look pretty interesting, or possibly and ice themed villian with refractive / SSS frost effects in his surroundings. Any of these Iray shaders are going to rely on Iray's lighting calculations as well which means that even though something may be toon it's still going to be lit more naturally with things like real world accurate indirect lighting.
Odd...I've had exactly the opposite "luck" with IRAY.
3DL always renders quicker, and IRAY gets real tricky with lights. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it goes nuts. I never know what I'm going to get out of IRAY until I hit the big button and wait.
3DL on the other hand pretty much always gives me exactly what I'm looking for and exactly what I designed.
Even with the...iffyness of IRAY though, I'm getting this and will see what I can do with it. ;)
There's no reason to wait until it renders to know what you'll get. Preview the image before rendering.
Here's my first go at a Sketchy character and render.
It took some playing around for me. Even with the video, some of the options are still a bit confusing. I wanted to experiment with the faux-rim light that's such a staple of superhero costumes. I still have to play with this character (those Toon Eyebrows don't match up with the G3M skin texture!), but I wanted to offer a sample for people who are still undecided. As a longtime fan of pwToon, it took me a long time to get the software to do what I'm happy with. Sketchy sure is promising!
That's more consistent with the look I'm going for. UGH, I spend a lot of $$ on this hobby and I just started a few months ago LOL!.
Don't worry, you'll get more stuff for your money later. At the beginning stages, there are stuff you have to get in order to do whatever it is you want to do. You can't get around that. But later you don't NEED stuff that badly, you can wait for a good sale. With that said, Sketchy was one of the few products that I bought immediately when it came out. :)
Here is my first test render with these shaders.
Render Time: 1hr 20min (Comp is older and not designed for 3D art.)
I have pwtoon, linerender9000, my free art shaders, and now sketchy.
Rendering in Iray, with good nvidia graphics cards, is often way faster for me.
My Iray art renders rarely take more than 5 minutes, while most of my large art renders in 3dl sometimes take an hour or more.
It's quite the expensive hobby! I don't think I'm the only person on these forums who's said that they've spent more money on their digital clothes than on real world clothes.
Just remember to comb the freebies section and ShareCG and similar sites for the many free things you can find.
In your opinion, is it worth buying any of the toon characters or do you just use the tools you mentioned? For example, Stylized Matt Figure and Hair for Genesis 3 Male(s) and Stylized Megan Character and Hair for Genesis 3 Female(s) are on sale right now. I only have Visual Style Shaders and I’m still on the fence about Sketchy.
Yeah I do that on a daily basis. I'm new at this, so I have a lot of things to accumulate. Just for fun, I've been coming up with story and character ideas for a graphic novel. Often, I don't have the assests (yet) to match my imagination.
I have been know to say in the past that to get toon renders out of Iray is a bit like driving a nail with a sponge cake. The sponge cakes must be pretty solid where you come from DT. Congrats on the product.
Here is my humble contribution. I post original render and sketchified render for comparison. I did not use the sketchy shaders on the eyes, but left them as my toon style eyes that were originaly made specifically to be used in conjunction with specialty render style shaders such as these.
Oh hey, one more note-when I apllied any of the 01 Full Shaders to my Keiko figure, the UV map bounced to Victoria 4. I had to manually change it back to Genesis 2 Base Female. Is it supposed to be doing that?
This is one using SpearCarriers' Iray Toon shader (ShareCG, for all but the eyes) with Sketchy. I also just changed to "defaults" on the Render Settings, which gave nice highlights. (NOTE: using the toon shaders from SC, the "full" presets don't work, as they overwrite the colors...so just use the rest of the settings) Much more toony! :)
Ok - I totally get those are two good reasons, thanks !
I never made the transition to Iray yet since up until recently I had no decent GPU - but I'm building a setup as I write this with a semi decent NVIDIA card so we'll see... ;)
@DestinysGarden I love the look in with the Sketchy shaders and your eyes! They go great together.
@3DOutlaw Your girl looks very good! Nice!
I found a problem with the pack - the shaders in the "01 Full Shaders" set have the UV Set saved in the settings. If you have a figure which can use the Victoria 4 UV Set (I have it for all 3 Genesis females), it will change the UV set to the Victoria 4 UV Set. The UV Set can be changed back as a workaround, but the shaders ought to be fixed to have that setting taken out.
I didn't test every shader in the "01 Full Shaders" folder, but the first 5 all had that problem. I spot checked the other folders and didn't encounter the issue so hopefully it's just that one folder.
If the shaders are used on a figure that doesn't have the Victoria 4 UV Set as an option, the UV Set remains unchanged.
I sent a trouble ticket in for this as well.
I totally removed the original diffuse maps and unsaturated to try and get a woodcut look
Is it loading Victoria 4 UVs for you like it is with DestinysGarden or are they different UVs? I wonder why it would be using V4 of all things, she certainly wasn't something I used when working on the set. Those UVs are also only available as an addon on current figures so I'm wondering if the issue only hits those with the addon or if it's loading different incorrect UVs for those who don't. I'll issue and update either way.
EDIT: It's only the first 10 Full Shaders that have the problem (Basic A-F and Sketch A-D). Seems to have something to do with using Genesis (namely Hitomi) as the base character during the creation procuess but I'm still not sure why it'd only affect 10 of them in that case. I'll have a fix posted here in a few.