Carrara Non Photo Realistic Works

Stezza

really starting to fire up those engines...

 

awesomeness 

UnifiedBrain

I havent been posting here lately, sorry.  It's partly because I've run out of superlatives to describe HW's renders.

Also, Stezza's ridiculously fine work with PSE 2018 has piqued my interest, and I have been waiting for a sale.

I just wanted to announce that Adobe has started their black Friday promotion, and that PSE 2018 is now on sale for sixty bucks US.  At that price, I'm likely to take the plunge.

To become just as good as Stezza, for only $60 - now, that is a deal!

Headwax

Stezza said:

really starting to fire up those engines...

 

awesomeness 

hey Stezza, what year Holden is that ?

 

Headwax

UnifiedBrain said:

I havent been posting here lately, sorry.  It's partly because I've run out of superlatives to describe HW's renders.

Also, Stezza's ridiculously fine work with PSE 2018 has piqued my interest, and I have been waiting for a sale.

I just wanted to announce that Adobe has started their black Friday promotion, and that PSE 2018 is now on sale for sixty bucks US.  At that price, I'm likely to take the plunge.

To become just as good as Stezza, for only $60 - now, that is a deal!

oh I can link you to a site with artist synonyms :)

you did a splendid job with the last challenge thank you,

 

I have photoshop elements 2018 (upgraded from 13? ) it's a got a few tweaks and is faster so worth it I think

 

Stezza

I think it's trying to be an FB ( 1960 )
Ub.... wish we could get it for $60! .... have fun

Thinking of Newcastle this weekend ,..... vroom! vrooooom!

Headwax

Stezza said:

I think it's trying to be an FB ( 1960 )
Ub.... wish we could get it for $60! .... have fun

Thinking of Newcastle this weekend ,..... vroom! vrooooom!

Ha ha Stezza that's a great image! You have the job next year.

Yes many of my driends have left t0wn for the event. Hopefully their homes wont have too many cracks in them when they get back.

Many of the Hoons who are coming from outside to see the 'race' are telling them to shutup and stop whinging !

Love it!

Anyone know of a good photoshop brush for skywriting ?

 

ps I can quit my job now because I just received this

I am here to inform you that your profile was randomly selected by our electronic mail extraction system during the ongoing Samsung online promo here on Facebook as one of the lucky winners of $800,000 and other consolation prizes from Samsung

 

 

 

Diomede

Tremendous!

 

Stezza said:

I think it's trying to be an FB ( 1960 )
Ub.... wish we could get it for $60! .... have fun

Thinking of Newcastle this weekend ,..... vroom! vrooooom!

 

PhilW

Diomede said:

It is good to be the king.

.

.

 

Love this - very dynamic and dramatic!

Diomede

Thanks, Phil.  That is the Daz gorilla with elements of Dartanbeck's forest construction kit and some volumetric clouds.

Headwax

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

PhilW

HW - great looking characters, did you make them?

Jonstark

head wax said:

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

That's terrific!  Are you rendering twice (once in NPR and once in Toonpro) and combining?  Did you make the brush yourself?  Would love to know more about how you achieved this effect, it really looks good.

Stezza

PhilW said:

HW - great looking characters, did you make them?

They are cool looking characters... I like the dog 

Headwax

thanks PhilW JonStark et Stezza :)

Phil the robots are available here (cat is a Daz item from ???) - I just retxtured them and made a few changes to the mesh - I added a skirt but didnt fiddle as you can see through pokethrough :)

I drew the eyes in post - since then I have given the mouths a morph using Fenricks' Unlock command - so they look less glum :)

Thanks Stezza :) :) The 'dog' is a cat :) I found in my Daz animals runtime .... I was looking for a dog - there is a robot diog somehwre in my Poser content , still to be shovelled up, If I cant find something smilar I will morph the cat a wee bit :)

there's also a mouse there too in the daz section :)

 

JonStark thanks, I'll get back with a description !

 

edit cat and mouse https://www.daz3d.com/d-claws-and-d-squeek

robot is tin man https://www.daz3d.com/tinman

their dog is d-dogged ? below image is not mine but the d-dpot robot dog not available now?

 

 

Dartanbeck

head wax said:

thanks Diomede et Dart - :) yes expressions from the back can say a lot without much detail

Dioemede - I ended up pulling their eyelashes into their heads and that saved a lot of post work !

I had to beef up the darker skinned child's facial contrast by a bit of burning and dodging - fill layer with neutral grey , make layer parameter Overlay

then attack that layer with burn and dodge - in retrospect could have gaussian blurred it a little as it looks patchy

Looks Great!

Dartanbeck

Stezza said:

really starting to fire up those engines...

 

awesomeness 

Did you make this? Looks fantastic!

Dartanbeck

head wax said:

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

 

 

Very nice. I hope that experience helps a person get used to this whole NPR render thing. I just don't have a handle on it using my default attempts. But I do enjoy watching your results and messing with Philemo's G'MIC. Well... and Howler is always fun!

Headwax

Dartanbeck said:

head wax said:

thanks Diomede et Dart - :) yes expressions from the back can say a lot without much detail

Dioemede - I ended up pulling their eyelashes into their heads and that saved a lot of post work !

I had to beef up the darker skinned child's facial contrast by a bit of burning and dodging - fill layer with neutral grey , make layer parameter Overlay

then attack that layer with burn and dodge - in retrospect could have gaussian blurred it a little as it looks patchy

Looks Great!

thanks Dart :)

 

Headwax

Dartanbeck said:

head wax said:

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

 

 

Very nice. I hope that experience helps a person get used to this whole NPR render thing. I just don't have a handle on it using my default attempts. But I do enjoy watching your results and messing with Philemo's G'MIC. Well... and Howler is always fun!

 

thanks Dart :)

A bit of process for JonStark and yourself and others  :)

=========================================

 I sat down today with a sphere and a cube, one of each  uveed and non-uveed ( primitive)

I should have also added a cylinder ( Cezanne believed that everything is a combination of these three shapes ? - maybe a pyramid as well.?)

I then rendered then with a muktitude of parameters with the NPR  and watched for a while.....

I made the shadows Blue, the Highlights Pink and the Lines Red so that i could see exactly what was happening.

===============================

Things I've learnt.

1) Carrara's included brushes are too dense - there needs to be more white within them. When you design your own add a peripheral falloff so that the brushes are not so discrete when you render (ie to make discrete brushstrokes less obvious)  The brushes I used with the above where just horozontal stippling - say 6 lines of horizontal dashes - the whole PNG for the brushe being 85 percent white the rest black . I diodnt use a falloff which is why you can see faint brush demarcations.

2) The NPR Highlights are mostly a waste of time as they are literally the Highlight of your shader - I thought initially they would pick up the lightest parys of shaders from light sources -  as in when we render in different tones. I havent played with ToonPro shaders to see wether this effects the Hghlight NPR effect.

3) do your shadows with a photorealistic shadow pass, not the NPR  - dirty then up in eg Fotosketcher , bring them back in to PS and use multiply or darker colour parameter. You could also use this shadow pass as a mask in PS if you wanted to combine to NPR renders - one being darker than the other. 

4) An ambient occlusion pass will (again photo realistic)  help add back more details to your NPR pass when combined in post . I think I worked with 150 percent ambient light (in assmbly room) for the robot images. Mu;tiply parameter again.

5) Toonpro - or the NPR line pass gives back outlines and details - Coverage pass not as good as mainly outlines OBJs

For lines you can get just a good result with NPR lines as Toonpro (with fiddling) - Toonpro much simpler - plus gives choice of depth line reduction - cant see the depth line reduction  makes much difference tho

6) in render room NPR section choose Object Cropping (think that is what is called -) this keeps your rendered lines in the shape

7)also  in the NPR section play with the tick boxes - I had more success with having only  Horizontal, Vertical and U ticked - having U and V ticked makes more of a hash up. Triangle, Normal and Hue gave unwanted results.

8) When rendering in NPR turn off all the lights in the assmble room then render NPR. Then turn them all back on and render NPR and compare the two renders - sometimes no lights is better :)

 

 

 

Next thing for me to try is a smple brush with a minimum of dots and play with fall off zone in the PNG.

 

sorry about Typos - hope this makes sense. Looking forward to seeing what people come up with :)

 

PS I am aiming at chris van allsburg kind of style in the very end  (Jumanji etc)

example in link

http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/9327/24302342.cd/0_8b36c_c6abca5_orig

 

 

 

Diomede

Great job, HW.  Very close to the style at the link. You are inspirational.

Stezza

Dartanbeck said:

Stezza said:

really starting to fire up those engines...

 

awesomeness 

Did you make this? Looks fantastic!

nope 

 

 

 

nice cat HW lol

Dartanbeck

head wax said:

Dartanbeck said:

head wax said:

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

 

 

Very nice. I hope that experience helps a person get used to this whole NPR render thing. I just don't have a handle on it using my default attempts. But I do enjoy watching your results and messing with Philemo's G'MIC. Well... and Howler is always fun!

 

thanks Dart :)

A bit of process for JonStark and yourself and others  :)

=========================================

Wow, thanks for all of the notes! 

Jonstark

head wax said:

Dartanbeck said:

head wax said:

more carrara NPR with the custom brush combined with ambient occlusion pass and toon pro

 

 

 

Very nice. I hope that experience helps a person get used to this whole NPR render thing. I just don't have a handle on it using my default attempts. But I do enjoy watching your results and messing with Philemo's G'MIC. Well... and Howler is always fun!

 

thanks Dart :)

A bit of process for JonStark and yourself and others  :)

=========================================

 I sat down today with a sphere and a cube, one of each  uveed and non-uveed ( primitive)

I should have also added a cylinder ( Cezanne believed that everything is a combination of these three shapes ? - maybe a pyramid as well.?)

I then rendered then with a muktitude of parameters with the NPR  and watched for a while.....

I made the shadows Blue, the Highlights Pink and the Lines Red so that i could see exactly what was happening.

===============================

Things I've learnt.

1) Carrara's included brushes are too dense - there needs to be more white within them. When you design your own add a peripheral falloff so that the brushes are not so discrete when you render (ie to make discrete brushstrokes less obvious)  The brushes I used with the above where just horozontal stippling - say 6 lines of horizontal dashes - the whole PNG for the brushe being 85 percent white the rest black . I diodnt use a falloff which is why you can see faint brush demarcations.

2) The NPR Highlights are mostly a waste of time as they are literally the Highlight of your shader - I thought initially they would pick up the lightest parys of shaders from light sources -  as in when we render in different tones. I havent played with ToonPro shaders to see wether this effects the Hghlight NPR effect.

3) do your shadows with a photorealistic shadow pass, not the NPR  - dirty then up in eg Fotosketcher , bring them back in to PS and use multiply or darker colour parameter. You could also use this shadow pass as a mask in PS if you wanted to combine to NPR renders - one being darker than the other. 

4) An ambient occlusion pass will (again photo realistic)  help add back more details to your NPR pass when combined in post . I think I worked with 150 percent ambient light (in assmbly room) for the robot images. Mu;tiply parameter again.

5) Toonpro - or the NPR line pass gives back outlines and details - Coverage pass not as good as mainly outlines OBJs

For lines you can get just a good result with NPR lines as Toonpro (with fiddling) - Toonpro much simpler - plus gives choice of depth line reduction - cant see the depth line reduction  makes much difference tho

6) in render room NPR section choose Object Cropping (think that is what is called -) this keeps your rendered lines in the shape

7)also  in the NPR section play with the tick boxes - I had more success with having only  Horizontal, Vertical and U ticked - having U and V ticked makes more of a hash up. Triangle, Normal and Hue gave unwanted results.

8) When rendering in NPR turn off all the lights in the assmble room then render NPR. Then turn them all back on and render NPR and compare the two renders - sometimes no lights is better :)

 

 

 

Next thing for me to try is a smple brush with a minimum of dots and play with fall off zone in the PNG.

 

sorry about Typos - hope this makes sense. Looking forward to seeing what people come up with :)

 

PS I am aiming at chris van allsburg kind of style in the very end  (Jumanji etc)

example in link

http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/9327/24302342.cd/0_8b36c_c6abca5_orig

 

 

 

Thank you very much HW, that's a wealth of details that will certainly help steer me on further experiments, I very much appreciate you sharing!  :)

Headwax

thanks Diomede and Stezza :)

Pleasure Dart and Jon - we're all in this together :)

Here is an image with two different brushes - the one on the left had no object clipping and Horizontal, Vertical and U ticked. P{lus slight different transparency settings? 

The one on the right has different ticks - you can see them in the pic 

The brushes are also shown in the picture - the one on the left has no falloff, the one on the right has a gradual fade towards the edges

of course the settings need to be tweakd for different scenes

now to sit down and use them on k4

looking forward to seeing what people come up with :)

Dartanbeck

Very neat stuff

UnifiedBrain

head wax said:

 

1) Carrara's included brushes are too dense - there needs to be more white within them. When you design your own add a peripheral falloff so that the brushes are not so discrete when you render (ie to make discrete brushstrokes less obvious)  The brushes I used with the above where just horozontal stippling - say 6 lines of horizontal dashes - the whole PNG for the brushe being 85 percent white the rest black . I diodnt use a falloff which is why you can see faint brush demarcations.

This alone is worth it weight in gold!  You are cracking the NPR engine code, HW.  It becomes more useful by the month.

I am also impressed by how you keep motivating yourself to try new things, in order to replicate the different styles of master painters.  And then you bring those ideas into Challenges, and we are all amazed at what you have discovered.

You have picked a wonderful muse, a dynamic goal that will never stop giving.  In seeing your approach, it is giving me some idea of how to find a dynamic goal for myself.  At the very least, I'm very grateful that you keep sharing the results!

Headwax

thank you Dart and UB :) that's very kind. I try and share what I've learnt because often I have picked up stuff from other people :) what goes around comes around. I hope ;)

today I have been working with several different brushes and different boxes ticked - plus playing with the minimum brush size 

interesting because eg U ticked might give a blcak eyeball whereas V ticked may not - so worthwhile varying them.

I revisited a few old scenes today (lazy me) and rerendered them with NPR and Photoreal passes and various ToonPros and combined them - 

These are some of the results - somethings ar a bit funy still like the kid on the left hand side eyes 

I  used PhotoDonut and FilterForge for the post work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stezza

nice filters.... my favs are the first and last images 

 

Did a bit of playing around during the breaks in the cricket... modeled an alien for my alien ship who isn't to friendly by the looks of the pigeon!... or what's left of him 
the echidna better look out

 

Dartanbeck

Very cool!

HW, wow... I love the styling you use - not just in the filters, but in the composition and such... just looks cool!

Here's an old one - perhaps the first time I tried oilify in Howler. Just found it while looking for the original render of this.

Headwax

Ha ha Stezza very funny :0 you model that echidna - ? I met one in the bush the other day waddling down my track :)

Dart - that's wonderful - very eeries - you encouregd me to finally download and open up Howler and have a waffle ")

Here's a reworked image from the tomato challenge