Help With Graphics Style
Faeryl Womyn
Posts: 3,623
My son played two games, Borderlands and Prince of Persia 4, and the graphics used really interested me. I added some links below that shows the type of graphics I am speaking of. It's a toon type of graphics and the colors are vibrant and I was wondering how to get the same effect. Anyone who knows what this type of toon coloring is or how to get the same effect, I would really like to know. Thank you in advance.
http://www.gamrbase.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/borderlands-2-characters.jpg
http://www.hdwallpapers.in/walls/prince_of_persia_game-normal.jpg
http://vineetnov.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/prince-of-persia-4-images.png
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It is a variation of cell shaded effect, I think. If you have Photoshop or similar program, you can probably create your own or something similar.
My idea would be to render 3D scene with full natural textures, with at least one strong light but as the shadowed area of figures is quite small on your examples, the light would have to be aligned under specific angle. There would be no or very little of spectacular/gloss maps or channels, but some bump/displacement and quite a bit of ambient channel.
Then in Photoshop, on duplicated layers, I'd use posterize, create outline and sharpen filters on various blend modes with original, playing with stronger contrast. You might need erase outlines on character faces and exposed skin. The idea here is to simplify the graphics through Posterize filter, add outlines with outline filters, and use sharpen to give it more grungy feeling (like on Prince of Persia promo link, although Borderlands doesn't have it much). Blending modes of layers (like Multiply, Overlay and others) along with opacity of them would be of big importance
Backgrounds in Prince of Persia seems to have more of watercolor effect instead, which can probably be created by careful arrangement of original with smart blur and watercolor effects.
In game it is made automatically, by in-game engine, of course, and I bet more complexly than that.
But if you notice the promotional art (first and third link in your links) are somewhat different than actual gameplay - lights are flatter on Borderlands character promo poster, for example, than on actual BD gameplay, and Prince of Persia is much more detailed in promo than in gameplay again. So depends on what you want you might need to change or adjust the process the process.
As Kattey said the style is called Cell Shaded.
There are various shaders available for poser and daz that might acheive a similar effect in a render, usually called anime or manga style shaders.
I'd disagree, sorry -_-. Manga or anime uses a very different type of cell shading, which uses flat fills and patterns more than real textures, and doesn't use any inner outlines.
Like that:
http://www.daz3d.com/manga-style-shaders
Which is very much different from Borderlands and Prince of Persia did.
There is a "Stylized Texture Tutorial" available at Unity wiki, that describe something similar
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Stylized_Texture_Tutorial
but I do not know if one can apply it in Daz Studio or Poser.
Well, I have to disagree with Kattey on Manga/Anime...
It comes in all kinds of styles, and flavors, but most only associate with the basics.
CalieVee:
It's called NPR (Non Photo Realistic) rendering, and is a completely different monster than (Photoshop-style) postwork, or what you might be able to achieve in DS with Manga/Anime shaders (also NPR).
It's hard to tell from those images, but they all (excluding the last; If that truly is an in-game screenshot, then I am very impressed) appear to be hand drawn illustrations for the products they are representing.
The apparent (last one) screenshot has evidence of background matte painting, and stylized lined cel shading for the character. You can achieve this with available free software, but it is not an easy task. It takes a lot of trial-n-error to develop the exact style, or look you wish to achieve. Using the images above can give you a baseline to strive for, though.
You can achieve NPR similar to your goals with Blender. Specifically the Freestyle branch that you can find here:
http://www.graphicall.org/
Freestyle is an open-source NPR render system that has been implemented into Blender. You can create whatever you envision. Here is the original website, and some Freestyle/Blender related ones to get you started:
Freestyle: http://freestyle.sourceforge.net/
Blender NPR: http://blendernpr.org/
Freestyle Integration: http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/
Freestyle For Blender (Forum): http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?89986-Freestyle-for-Blender
I hope this helps...
Out of curiousity, please show me an anime/manga that has the same style as those game screenshots. I saw quite a lot of of manga and anime but never ever saw style like that used in those genres.
\Carrara can do stuff like in the images shown in this tutorial at the bottom.
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/tutorial.php?TutorialId=3
Okay, I don't know anything about shaders (except that people are always talking about them here), but I've been working out my own style to achieve similar appearance with post work in Photoshop. I do all my renders in DazStudio 2.3 and post in Photoshop CS2 (when my settlement comes I'll be getting a new computer so upgrades are on the way!), and I use a set of 'toon' filters I bought at Renderosity called Toon Actions by Adam Wright.
I threw this together as an example in the last 20 minutes; The hair looks wonky as I didn't put it in a background, but that will be fixed in the next version (longer render time). David 3, with four lights, pretty basic quick render.
When it was done I selected all of the white from the background and copy pasted it to create a mask layer; then I ran a series of actions I've created that incorporates the base "toon it" set from the above linked Actions, minus the postorize setting.
One of the tricks is to create a separate layer, select the space filled with the primary figure, expand your selection by four pixels, then fill with black. This layer goes below the main image to create the outline.
-Mike
I used the same techniques with my entry in the Stonemason contest, A Bad Day on Laika Station, although I slimmed down the outlines a bit more than you would want to to copy the look you've presented..
Kattey...I have never seen this style used in anime and manga, only in the two games mentioned. Anime/Manga are my interest for some story lines I am working on and I think this style would be perfect for them. It's different enough to grab attention and to compliment the theme of the stories. I am still working out how best to go about doing an animation, as I only have the current Daz right now and on a dual core computer. The goal is to have a dual quad core, to have the power necessary to do an animation in less then the current time frames with the current programs.
I want to thank everyone for their imput and the links. I don't have Blender, though I did install and open it a couple times, I just couldn't get my head around it. I have Carrara 5 Pro right now, the version that came free with 3D World mag a few years ago, but have never installed it. One question I should have mentioned and has not been answered is whether or not it's more practical to use a 3D program to get the results I want, or do each frame individually in a 2D program. My thinking is the 3D program would probably be the better way to go, which means most likely using shaders (cell shaders maybe as mentioned?), will have to look at that tutorial for Carrara cause that seems to be the closest to what I want so far.
I'm on a dual core as well; If I hadn't had other things to do I would have finished this last night, but the background render did take half an hour, post work 20 minutes.
-Mike
CalieVee, my question about anime was for DaremoK3, sorry for misunderstanding ^^"
If you plan to do animation, then a proper shader is a key. You will spend eternity paining each frame in Photoshop even with time-saving actions, or by processing it through video filters, and the result will probably still not look as good as shader-based animation. Sadly I can't help you here as I know very little about animation or shaders but you might ask around DS Discussion forum http://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/16/ if anybody wants to help you with custom shader for DS if you want to use that program. I believe it might be possible to make DS shader like that.
Kattey:
Sorry, I meant it as a general statement regarding Anime/Manga. Many more examples of Anime/Manga can be seen in Japanese magazines such as Newtype, and Shonen Jump than what the average American (my basis, since I am in the U.S.) is usually exposed to. I was going by those magazines that I own from Japan (as well as a compilation Anime video from Japan circa 1990's).
I haven't seen any examples exactly like CalieVee's in Anime/Manga other than the matte painting which is standard in most animations.
CalieVee:
You could go with post-work, or find some shaders that you can manipulate to a style you want to use in the programs you own and use. I haven't seen anyone using Poser, DS, or Carrara accomplish images like those with just shaders, but it doesn't mean they aren't out there, and can't be done.
My suggestion is based on that I suspected you wanted to emulate those styles exactly in 3D, and Freestyle is the only software I have seen results (without post-work) that are on par with what you have shown. Plus, I wanted to give you a free solution, but if you can't wrap your head around Blender, then I guess you will have to find another avenue.
There is always Illustrate, or finalToon for 3DS Studio Max.
pwToon can do a similar effect (hold down the cmd key when applying and ignore original textures).
Check out what Rduda did here: Rdudas recipe for comic style renders
The pic he created is two posts earlier. This link is for the "how did he do it?" explanation. It's labor intensive (many steps) so good for one-off still shots, not useful for animations or anything like that. But wow, what a fantastic effect!
Hey, thanks for pointing that out, I missed it before.. I'm about to get a new computer and I think I could render the textureless version on this at about the same speed as the full version on the new one..
This one looks very nice as well : http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21273/
Thought I'd pop in with a few suggestions.
I tend to use post work to create this type of style as can be seen in the sample images below.
The first is a render from DS, scaled to 50% & converted to a JPEG from the original PNG file but with no other post work.
The second is converted using a piece of software called Urban Graphics from Cybia Software, converted using the Auto Enhance feature and with colours set to 16 in the software.
The third image is converted using Cybia Software's Pulp Styler package, Auto Enhanced, & Photo Outline style selected (This is selected after conversion).
The fourth image is again converted using Pulp Styler but with the Airbrush Outline style selected after conversion.
The fifth image is a cartoon conversion using GIMP (Filter-Artistic-Cartoon) with the Mask size set to 10 & the Percent Black set to 0.2.
Usually I won't use the output from these programs directly but layer & blend multiple versions using GIMP before applying any other final post work.
NOTE, I bought Pulp Styler & Urban Graphic (along with a third package, Super Snap) in a graphics bundle from Renderosity but it would appear to be no longer available there. But an updated package called Graphic Styler is available directly from Cybias own site which is an enhanced package that combines both original packages as a single program with further enhancements. I do not have this at this time but will be looking into it, a free demo version is available from the site.
Also note that the original packages do not require installation, simply unpack and run, not sure it the new one requires installation, they would seem to be Windows only.
Disclaimer, I am not in anyway connected with the site or the software other than as a user.
Links:
http://www.cybia.co.uk/index.html Cybia Site
http://www.cybia.co.uk/graphicstyler.html Graphic Styler page
EDIT: After a quick glance at the users guide on the Cybia website it would seem that the new package does need to be installed and it is Windows only, but it seems to have a number of new options.
All the help and links is great, thanks guys and yes I did grab the shader by BishounenTaurus, it does have the thinner black lines necessary to create the effect I am looking for, so the next step is to get the vibrant colors as that is what it appears to look like to me...really vibrant colors in toon form, I have no other way to describe it at the moment, haven't slept in over 30 hours and need to hit the hay...lol
My original thought is to do this in the animation as I figured it would take too long to do each frame as mentioned earlier. Since I am doing this by myself and on one computer, I need to be able to accomplish it is as few steps and little time as possible to get what I want. I plan to do short animations at a time, due to using only one computer and as yet can't afford the dual quad core. If you take a look at most anime, there are short enough scenes to be able to do about 3 to 5 minutes and piece everything together. That appears to be the best way to not over tax my computer right now, and allows me to see the progress of how the colors look and make any other changes necessary. Since my son seems to have the ability to figure things out (puzzle solver extraordinaire) he figured out puppeteer and animate in about 15 min without looking at tutorials and is going to help me with trying to add sound, once I get the coloring part down.
First things first, have to solve how to color the animation and will go over all the links everyone has given me.