Would like suggestions for making a cartoonish animation

Mosk the Scribe

I'm making an animation for someone using Carrara 8.5 Pro, with postwork in After Effects CS6.

The goal is something that looks roughly like Persepolis trailer

After Effects does let you apply black and white effects, along with a cartoon effect - which gets fairly close to the look my client is after.

Also considering the non-photorealistic renderer in Carrara
1) to generate some line drawings that will be similar to the sketches my client has already made
2) and to render non-photorealistic diffuse for main animation to brin into After Effects.

One thing we're considering is using a sketch as a 2D background and then just one or two elements like a person walking or talking (with a shadow catcher as necessary).

Would welcome any general suggestions, as well as any specific recommendations regarding shaders. Client really doesn't want extra shading / texturing. Didn't know if it would make sense to just retexture in photoshop so very simple with pretty much one skin tone or any other tricks people would recommend.

Thanks

WendyLuvsCatz

interesting
most would use Magna or Anime studio with drawings rather than 3D but it is possible.
I think having characters and sets that actually look like that the first step.
I would animate drawings of faces from a program I have called crazytalk by Reallusion and use image sequences in diffuse channel for the vector graphics look.

wetcircuit

You have a lot of choices/options, but at some point you will want to stop trying to "fix" everything in post and start making custom shaders so you can build your "toon" scene in Carrara.

I am not a fan of NPR. It is designed to look like charcoal/pastels controlled by a "brush". Every line on the final render is "drawn" by that same brush. An outline looks like hundreds of tiny applications of that brush.... You will quickly see how limiting that is, and wonder why you can't just get a clean line.

I recommend some plugins:
TOONPRO from DCG - gives a better Outline renderer and Toon shaders
SHADERSPLUS from DCG - when you need the texture to render as-is with no light interactions

the "fuzzy" pic is the NPR renderer. I don't think you would have any success trying to animate it, but if you used Wendy's suggestion of CrazyTalk then you can create most of your scenes from still renders...

the clean outline is just the ToonPro renderer. The solid pic is the ToonPro renderer and some ToonPro shaders...

wetcircuit

Here is ToonPro shaders reacting to a single light in the scene to provide some depth/edge highlight...

wetcircuit

One more, separated the eyewhite and skin shaders... This is straight out of Carrara. No post.

Mosk the Scribe

Wendy and Holly - much thanks for your replies. I'm considering both of these options.

Wendy: I have CrazyTalk (version 6) and am a little familiar with Reallusion's Animator2 - do you know if I can simply render a full body picture of a character from DAZ / Carrar and then use that png image as a full body character in Animator2? Is it simple to attach bones to such a figure and then use IK for movement? (wasn't clear to me if I'd need the whole Pipeline version or iClone to do that, or if that's only for bringing in motion files through fbx)

Holly: I downloaded a trial of Toon!Pro from Digital Carver's Guild - but seem to be running into lots of problems getting it to work right.

If I just take a DAZ character like M4 (say M4's face or fabric on a t-shirt or a cart) and I change the top of each shader from MultiChannel to Toon!Pro Cel Shader - the model simply ends up vaishing wherever I've changed the shader. Tried playing with the parameters (shdaow/highlight. levels, and shadow brightness - doesn't help.

Don't know if the whole Toon Pro Cel download simply stops working after a few minutes.

Ideally, I'd be able to use standard DAZ characters like M4./V4 and get them to have the same 'cartoon' appearance of the images you displayed in the posts above. SHould that be possible with the DCG Toon plugin?

I've also had mixed results with the Toon Renderer - where it doesn't look much different from standard of M4 face or chest with default shaders.

Thanks for any suggestions either of you can offer.

wetcircuit

re: ToonPro

yes, I think the plugin times out after 10min or maybe after a certain amount of rendered pixels...? Not sure. The limited pixels (on certain plugins, not sure which) include preview renders in the shader room :/ and the spot renderer in the main room - so it runs out very fast....

The figure above is a standard poser-verse figure called AikoToon available here in the DAZ store.... Any figure/model you use in Carrara you can do this to.

The plugin has some settings, in the renderer you have the option of "nesting" a photoreal render within (under) ToonPro. There is a toggle switch at the top of the secondary (photoreal) render settings to do a base render. By "base" they mean do the second render with the settings that follow. Turn that off and you won't get the "textured" render. You can however get the alphachannel from that base render, so you have a toon render that is ready to composite in AE, etc....

I haven't used Animator, but yes that is the idea, render out the basic parts and use Animator to rig a 2D puppet. There are videos on Reallusion's site. The FBX/iClone workflow is just so you can import iClone motions into Animator. You don't *need* those programs to use it.

WendyLuvsCatz

I only have the standard version of CT Animator as I really only use the face fitting feature.
more for photos than 3D renders.
picked it up for $29 in a sale, was really only after CT standard itself but the animator same price so grabbed it
version I have bodies are only using bought content with a few set motions so know nothing about the sprite features.
You could always do the trial.

evilproducer

holly wetcircuit said:

One more, separated the eyewhite and skin shaders... This is straight out of Carrara. No post.

All of those are really cool Holly! I may have to look at that plugin. Do you know if you can still get it for Carrara 7.2?

wetcircuit

evilproducer said:

holly wetcircuit said:

One more, separated the eyewhite and skin shaders... This is straight out of Carrara. No post.

All of those are really cool Holly! I may have to look at that plugin. Do you know if you can still get it for Carrara 7.2?
Yep. Still has downloads for Carrara 6.2, 7.2, 8.x

I've had this plugin forever and used the outines, but never really played with the shaders... I wanted to do a b&w projects like this for a while...