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This looks really nice! the little twis makes a good difference I think. Very well done.
Hi dHandle, I really like the mood and the light in this one and the positioning of the two does have a certain tension, however I wouldn't call this an action shot. I'm sure there will be action one of the next moments, but right now it's more the silence before the storm.
I prefer this camera angle as is gives a little bit a better idea of what the great hullaballoo is all about. Otherwise funny thing this!
Been lurking all month, but haven't felt comfortable sharing my WIP until now. There are still some tweaks I am working on, but wanted to get this out there while there was still time to get some feedback.
I don't see a whole lot of toon renders in the Galleries and Forums, but that is what I intend to do with Daz, so while I am learning I will be submitting a lot of toon renders.
Thanks in advance for your feedback
Edit: Er.... width is a little squished... so click on the image to view it full size, and I will figure out how to do this better next time...
Hi Lin.
HA! You know what!? I DID lose track of the fact that this month's theme is action, with an emphasis on interaction with props. I was concentrating so much on the interaction between the lion (prop) and the main actor, that I completely overlooked the action part.
Dang!
Oh well...maybe next month.
Really cool render though dHandle!
@Linwelly, thanks for the tip!
Ok, I made some major adjustments to the mom and dad posing. One-handed just didn't seem right ... especially when it comes to taking out a spider! And because her arm covered her face, I had to reverse everything. Please let me know what you think. I also added lighting, clothing, and a few other adjustments.
Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks so much!
I think that version j is the one that I'll be posting as my entry, but like usual I'm having trouble thinking of a title.
Sugestions please?
(Sorry about the spelling, it's early in the morning were I'm at and I should be trying to catch some zzz. night all.)
I like what you have going there! What are you using to get the toon effect? I've been trying to learn visual style shaders to get a comic or toon look.
Here is another form of my WIP I am only looking for the posing comments right now I am still working on the lighting an shadows etc.....
Thank you so much, Holloko! I've been working on this look for a couple of months now, so it feels good to get positive feedback when I start sharing it. Mostly I have tweaked the Visual Style Shaders to blend in the light color (It's kind of choppy right now, but I hope to share the tweaks when I have them worked out, and when I can find a way to do it without infringing on the authors IP), and then use ToonyCam Pro for the outlines. For the eyebrows and wound, I actually make four different image maps for the different Visual Style Shader colors (Diffuse Light, Diffuse Dark, Occlusion Dark, Occlusion Light) that is white everywhere except where I want the eyebrows or wound to be. The only problem with this approach is that the color of the shader get's blended into the color of the object, so it just doesn't quite look right, so I'm looking to create more tweaks to the Visual Style Shaders to allow for image overlays. Another tweak that really helps is to turn the shading levels on the ToonyCam way up (to like 50) and the Shading blend way down (to like 0.1) This will preserve any look you created with the Visual Style Shaders, but still get you the outlines.
That is probably more than what you were looking for, but if you're interested in what I'm trying with my Visual Style Shader tweaks, here is a render I posted to the galleries of the progress I am making with the whole light blending thing.
Anyway, since this was kind of a lengthy post, I should probably justify it with a render. This migth be what I submit unless I have any time late tonight. I just fixed some colors, added a spec map to the face that removed the specular color from the eyebrows, made his face a little more expressive, and did some really minor post work mixing a an outlined render with a non-outlined render to get rid of an unwanted line in the wing caused by a weird bulge in the wings. If I had time, I would try to get the eyebrows to match his hair, and figure out if I could fix the weird straight lines in the platform, not sure if those are caused by textures or geometry...
Thank you for the detailed info. I think you have a great look going. The render you linked to looks very nice. I like the way you were able to add a bluish shade to her so it looked like a light was shining from the right. I have toony cam pro, but I haven't done much with it yet. Looks like that may be one of the missing elements I need. You may have already checked out this thread but it has some good info and tips for visual style shaders. It also has some free lighting presets and a character outline for geoshells preset. Using geoshells may also be a way you can add layer effects.
I look forward to seeing more from you and learning more about developing this kind of style.
Latest version of my hockey wip. I still have some work to do on the jerseys, but it's getting there. I've changed the posing slightly, but still plan to do some more work on posing in the morning.
Maybe the straight lines vanish, when you increase the platforms subdivision level. See this tutorial how to do it:
Well done, my only critique are the blades of the ice skates. They seem to have the same color as the sole. That gives the impression of some plastic material, instead of polished metal.
Very nice work, I really like the venture into toon and the action is nice. Only critique is that I would like to see the dragon in the back a bit more distinct, either with some more light or a tint into another colour.
Remember today is the last day! Don't forget to show your finished works over in the Entries thread.
Well, apparently I am going to have to go with what I have because the scene will not load into studio to make any changes. I may try to find the time to do a bit of post work on it tonight but the changes I had planned in studio are not going to happen...
Well, I didn't have time to do this earlier to get feedback, so it is what it is. I was hoping to have time to develop more of a story, but it basically turned into practicing a bunch of new things. This month I started learning about toon renders, motion blur, how to do some stuff with puppeteer, how to morph terrains (still working on the clothing thing), found out Daz will use .obj files, found some really good free content, etc. It has been a great month for learning. Thanks to everyone who has offered such great input into this discussion board, I appreciate it!
That said, I think the background is blurred too much and I added too much motion blur to the background figures. I also think my shading is too dark on my character, especially for such a sunny day. I still need to work on adding shaders or using the toony cam pro to get a toon background (but I can't do motion blur with the toony cam because it uses scripted 3delight). Fun nonetheless.
This is going to have to be good enough since I can't load it in Studio. I did want to work on the posing a bit more but the file seems to be corrupted.
Dang, Sonja! I hate when that happens. I lost a file once, if you remember, back in November when we were doing that tutorial on materials with Dollygirl. We used that little girl model and her dress and the bear. Well, that freebie bear model crashed my computer every time I tried to load the saved scene. I had to totally redo the scene, replacing the bear with a bunny once I figured out which prop was the problem. I wouldn't be surprised if you have a similar problem.
A shame too! This is a great render!
Did you use any freebie props in this scene? You might try loading the props one at a time by themselves. Save the scene, then try to reload it after saving. If it crashes your comp, you found it.
I did this one for fun, since I ran out of time on my blurred action scene with the angel, and there wasn't enough action in my warrior and lion render.
(There's probably not enough action in this one either...but like I said, it's just for fun.)
Title: Action!
(You get it, right?)
And here's the shot after post production:
Well, I finally came up for air after 35 hours overtime in two weeks... too late to enter the contest, bummer.
Good luck to everyone - there's some great renders here!
Yes! This was exactly what I needed! Thank you! The only problem I have with the end result is that it looks like there are some white artifacts around the eyebrows. I'm not sure if this is because the color I chose for the shader is white, or if this is related to the white artifacts you see around other areas where opacity is used in a Daz Render (for example if you leave the backdrop transparent). Either way, I didn't have any time to improve it, but it looks SIGNIFICANTLY better than the dark caterpillars I had on before.
Also a perfect solution! I still have that one awkward straight line in the middle of the scene, but I think this made a huge difference. Thank you!
I felt this way from the begining and was saving it for last to figure out how to fix this. I tried creating a lighter backdrop from the corridor and tried to get a back light or some volume light to outline him, but I couldn't get any of that to work this afternoon, so I tried changing his color. I went to gold, to red, to blue. The blue was actually a good contrast, but looked unnatural since the lighting is orange. The final image is the result of progressively blending orange into the blue color until I felt that it fit in the scene again.
Unfortunately, my idea of what looks natural still ends up with the top of his head being really dark right smack dab in the center of the focal point, which I think just doesn't look good.
Also, some minor adjustments must have been made to the position of the face just enough to mess up the way normals are being calculated around the chin, resulting in some pretty weak outlines where they looked better in the previous render.
Oh well, it was good to challenge myself to say this was "complete" within a certain time frame, rather than just tweaking it indeffinitely.
Here is the final render. Thanks everybody for the help!
So it wasn't until I saw your final submission above that I realized that you were a participant in the contest, I thought you were a mentor! Then I went back to grab this image because I wanted to tell you what I liked about it, and now I am reading the text and feel bad cause I might have been able to help with some of this if I had read it earlier, and you had helped me a lot.
So, first, you probably won't like this, but I actually liked this look better than the final render. The crisp lines make it look like an illustration. I think one of the reasons I was nervous to post my toon render for a long time was because for the longest time it did not look as good as this one :)
Anyway, the only thoughts I wanted to share that might be helpful for future toon renders:
1. I think by default VS does not accept shadows, so if you want shadows you have to set "Accept Shadows" to on.
2. As you already observed, using VS is a little like "Color by Numbers" for your scene. It's really easy if all the light are white, but doesn't work well if the light is a different color and you want that reflected on your surface. I create a pallet in GIMP with all the colors, and then I take the light color choose some opacity and paint over all the other colors with the color of the light. Sometimes I use "Normal" mode to paint over, but I think "Addition" is the more correct affect that a colored light has on the color of an object.
Another thing I learned about light and color (but not mastered yet) is that your shadows are still going to be affected by the color of your light. A shadow is not the absence of light, otherwise shadows would be completely black (which is why pure black is rarely a good color to ever use). A shadow is just where there is less light, but there is still light in a shadow that has bounced around all the other objects in the room. So when "mixing" your diffuse dark and occlusion dark colors, still mix in some of the light color, but decrease the opacity even more so than you do for the colors that are in the light.
Anyway, that's what I do... I use 50% opacity for the light colors, and 25% opacity for the dark colors... and then I load all the colors back in manually to Daz... and still don't like them after taking such a technical approach, but it at least gives me a better starting point.
Anyway, I'm always eager to share things I am learning, so maybe you already know all this, but maybe it will help a future Googler. I think what I am really trying to say is I hope we both have time to participate in next month's challenge, and I hope you do another toon render so I have someone to keep learning with!
To brighten just the head of the dragon, because it has the very useful Fall Off Option there is the Linear Point Light for DAZ Studio/3Delight renders. You may take a look at Knittingmommy´s Laboratory how this wolf render was made: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1130381/#Comment_1130381
More advanced but even better are the Uber Area Lights, also with the useful Fall Off Option: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14536/tutorial-uber-area-lighting-the-basics/p1
CONTEST CLOSED
I did manage to fix the blades and make some changes to my render and upload it before the deadline. Thanks everyone for all the suggestions!
Good luck, everyone!
I do remember. No freebies in this one. I just didn't have time to go through and try everything so its just going to have to stand as is. I might revisit it though at a future date because I really like this one.