Toon fun with Subsurface Toon Shaders
will2power
Posts: 270
I have been working on learning the ins and outs of Genesis and the various toon characters provided by 3D Universe. I like the toon figures like Hiro, Hitomi & Aiko 5, and the 3D Universe toons. I bought Jasmine and Jason when they first came out for Genesis, but to be honest --I didn't really like how they rendered. The flat colors didn't really suit them and the default skin for Jason's eyebrows never looked right. I always liked the Pixar like look of the 3D toons, but there didn't seem to be an easy way to achieve the look for a novice like me until the Subsurface Toon Shaders came out. The greatest thing about them is that there are 16 variations of color out of the box. I don't know why it is, but no one ever seemed to think that toons should be anything other than Caucasian.
The test renders convinced me that this was something really cool, especially since it works for any Genesis figure --not just the toons. That's a real game changer for me. You can do something here that you can't really do with the other skins as I see them. You can take a broad range of models, and make them all look consistent.
The first picture are some original characters. They're all supposed to be a part of the same family. The Father's the Dark skinned man in the center. His four sons and one daughter are in the shot as well. I was trying for the long time to try and get a consistency of the textures between them. I wasn't really going for hyper-realism; I was just going for getting them to look consistent. The second picture is that same scene, but I went back and used the toon shaders, coupled with the Genesis Eyebrow set. It yielded a much more result.
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Comments
I used the standard render settings. The background kitchen was just a stock photo I added later. Rendered in Daz Studio 4.6
This second example is just something I did for fun. I realized that I had just about every 3D Universe human figure for Genesis except for the Old Man Rex. Now I think the guys at 3D Universe did a great job with their design, but the Subsurface Toon Shaders really added a great depth to my render. I thought I'd give a try and see just how serious a scene I could put together with all their figures and see just how diverse I could make them look. I Just put them in Sandy Bay as a trbute to summer for the toons.
I had to resize the figures to make them work in the scene. Jasmine, Toon Amy and Jason were scaled to about 65%. Jazlyn, Sadie and Sam each had to be tweaked in scale to fit, but once they were sized --it really came together.
I did the first render and it came out horrible. the figures had rings all over. I was using the default settings on everything and one or two figures will render fine together, but take a look at the way it turned out the first time. The girls in the forefront were fine, all the boy figures had these horrible rings on their skins. I tore my hair out trying to figure out where I went wrong. Well, I learned that figures don't load with high res textures by default. It's fine for one or two --but if you add more than five you may see this. However, I did a render again after changing each figure's toon texture to High Resolution. It took a lot longer, but the rings were gone and the results were very satisfying.
I really like how these turned out, particularly the last one. Great to see the shaders included variations of dark skin. You can never have too many options there. I need to put these shaders on my wishlist.
Very nice renders. Of your first two pictures of the family, I actually prefer the first image over the second. They look more life-like. I do think that at least some of the guys need hair, but that's just me. .
Thanks for posting this. I actually didn't notice the rings till you pointed it out and I looked closer. I would have been stumped at least for a bit I'm sure if it happened to me. Nice final image :)
Yeah, I know. It drove me crazy for like two hours of rendering trial and error. If I can save someone else the headache and frustration, then at least it's not in vain.
This seems to be a pattern btw... I've seen other posts where people were getting artifacts and the solution was to render with higher resolution textures using the new shader. It seems to be sensitive perhaps to low resolution maps and artifacting? Not enough structured testing to be sure yet if it's a general thing with the new shader.
I did another render to see what one of the non human tones would come out. This is Freak 5 and I know it's cliche, but that didn't stop me from doing it anyway. I'm going to try to do one of all the different skin tones so people can see just what the set can do.
He's not big enough to be green ;p
I wanted to do one that gave a good view of how the skin looks all over, so I put together this render on the beach at Sandy Bay.
I shoulda gone with the Freak 5 Super, huh? You're right. I'll try the Image again tonight... I don't have Mr. Hyde yet, but when I get him I'll do a little experimenting to see if I can produce something suitably more hulkular...
You can always go in and tweak individual settings :)
And Hyde is a nice character.. well suited for a hulk... I think you'll like it.