Getting very close to being able to do 3D Manga like I want to...
I've been wanting to do manga type stories for a long time now. I've always been held back by not being able to achieve a manga look from the available resources. The models look beautiful and I really enjoy working with them, but I could never figure out what I was doing wrong.
Too much detail.
That was what I was having an issue with. There's too much detail in the models that I work with and that makes the eye tell you that this is not manga. It's easy to get wrapped up in Iray and all it's capablitites but I have learned to scale back my efforts and this has yielded some pretty interesting results. This is an Image that I worked on just a few days ago. I used Sketchy Iray Toon Shaders for a lot of the models I used them sparingly though. For intance, I didn't use it with her skin, nor did I use it on the floor of Level 19. This was the result.
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Now it's about 80% of the look I want, but the thing is, the toon shader on skin doesn't yield consistent results, so I used it on her clothes and opted to do the not do the skin. When I got that render, I took it into my ipad, and did a test of some quick and dirty line work with sketchbook pro just to see if I could get it to look close. I was surprised at how well it turned out.
I am sort of in the same boat although I'm not going for the Manga Look, just a clay or 3D Disney type look
Using the morphs to create new caricatures is pretty easy but once you drop the textures it is hard to get a varied look to the surfaces that is a good toon compromise from the high resolution textures.
I think I will buy Star 2.0 as good examples and I already have TG2 as good examples but I was wanting to drop textures all together.
You may be able to accomplish what you want in post work using Photoshop (Gimp maybe?). My Google search isn't coming up with anything, but I'm sure there's a style or filter or two that can get you there (I'm using Photoshop 7, I'm sure a LOT of filters and styles have been added since then). I did manage to dumb down the colors on a render that I dragged into Photoshop, but I don't rememer exactly what I did...
First image is the baseline Daz Render. The second image I did something to, not sure what. The third image I used a conte crayon filter on. This feels more like a western cartoon style, but you get the idea.
This came up in my search:
Making Torabot: Creating graphic novel style images from 3D renders:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_5imwz5h2M
This Daz thread also came up:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19098/shaders-for-create-style-cartoon-anime-manga-tutorial-box-magic
A couple of products also popped up:
https://www.daz3d.com/visual-style-shaders
https://www.daz3d.com/manga-style-shaders
This thread popped up for the above two products:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/10961/manga-style-visual-style-topic-update-may-19th-2013-gso-shader-added-bugfix-commercial/p1
Hopefully some of this is helpful to you.
in this image I think you have nailed the girl - have you tried Topaz Simplify out of interest?
I haven't. in the past, I used Filter Forge which has a lot of comic filters for photoshop I'm attempting to get as close to a hand drawn look in black and white, but with a more unique presentation so that the people who see it will soon come to recognize it as a style on it's own. I'm not really locked down to one medium or program to do it, but I find that DAZ models offer the best results. I've been contemplating doing the renders in Modo and taking advantage of Modo's NPR Kit 2. The thing that's sadly lacking when it comes to comic book realism in DAZ unfortunately, is the clothes and hair. If I stay in DAZ, I will most certainly be using something like VWD to achieve more realistic looking clothes and I'm experimenting with some different methods with the hair. I've pretty much determined that there are only a handful of DAZ hair products that are going to work well with this render method and look very close to a Manga style. So as the old saying goes, if the apples you get from one tree are rotten, try a different tree. This is just a case where the stuff you buy in the store is not going to yield the results that I wan't, so I will not rely on much of it to get the kind of render that I want. . My compliments to Dimensiontheory's Sketchy Toon, though It's made a lot of the work easy to visuallize.
must go and check out filter forge again - I havent seen anything in ff that is convincing on my renders - must be me :)