Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
You need to step it off a little, okay? Dial it back a bit. I don't mind sharing techniques, but maybe don't hound me to do so.
oops my bad and i apologize.. stepping back here sorry again.
I think this is about as good as I can get Joy to look with this method. At this point I'm experimenting with different ideas again. Even with postwork, I just can't make the look pop enough with darker skinned characters.
love the eyes and curves well done :)
Thanks. Joy is a fit character, but I also want her to be sexy, so I had to toe a line between toned and curvy. Whereas Eleanor is straight up thicc.
Refining an earlier Sakura G8 hybrid into one of my comic characters, Eleanor.
Didn't even post work this one. Just turned out fine the way it came out of D|S!
Working towards cobbling together a G8 male mate for Sakura that's sufficiently masculine for my liking. The only "official" mate for her is litereally just a male morph for a female character.
Animedoll was forever ago. But her hair still works just fine for modern NPR. All you gotta do is convert them to Sub-D. Hell, they even parented to the G8 figure automatically!
Finally got dark skin tones to look right with the shader. Pics to follow when I get a hot minute to render some.
The original render looked a bit dull, so I did a tiny bit of postwork to make the colors pop more.
Reworking some of my other characters.
Camilla via G8 turned out very well.
More new body shape practice than anything.
@vrba79 Did you ever make a PDF tutorial of how to use these shaders?
Oh, the Dr. Sinister "show" never made it past the planning stage. Like I said, my friend's death just took the wind out of the sails for that project.
As for the toon rendering I used a lot in this thread so far. That's actually the toon render that comes built into Daz|Studio! Its lightning fast and pretty versitile. I never made the pics for this tutorial, but it does include the info you'll need to make some nice toon renders:
Select each thing in your scene then go to your content library. In Shader Presents you're going to find the "DsDefault" folder. In that folder you'll see "DzToonMatte". Apply that to everything.
Note: If you're converting from IRAY to 3DL, you're going to have to probably reapply your transmaps manually, even if you held down CTRL when you applied it.
Now, if you were to render it now, you'll be met with a very ugly looking result. That's because there are a few things to do, before it's going to look right.
First thing you're going to want to do is jettison all bump maps.
For skin I like to disable the diffuse maps and just use color. This method makes you lose eyebrows, so apply an eyebrow object(Hiro 5 and Hitomi each come with one), or draw some on in post if you go this route.
Then you're going to set the Blending amount to at least 65%, I find for textured clothes like jeans 100% works best.
For most skintones, you'll want to set ambient to 25% and the ambient color to a light pink.
Next set the Outline Density to 1 or 2. Disable it completely if you're putting it on a flat surface like a floor or table top.
Lighting.
Keep it simple, you can usually get away with one Distance light and maybe a spotlight set to a lower intensity to make the skin pop more.
Optional - Better Outlines.
I tend to disable the "Outline density", create a geoshell for everything in the scene and then apply the "Geometry Shell Outline Shader" you can get for free. Its a few extra steps but the result looks great. After applying the "Geometry Shell Outline Shader" make sure to manually apply the transmaps to the shells covering stuff like hair. Also, set the material opacity to 0 on any shell materials for the eye or mouth areas, and be sure to set the viewport opacity to 0 for all shells.
Optional - Hair Shader.
I find that instead of applying the "DzToonMatte" shader to the hair, a much nicer looking option is the "DG Toon Style Hair Shaders" you can find for about $19.00 on the Daz3D store. They look excellent with pretty much any hair I've used them with.
Optional - G8 Eyes.
G8 characters do not have those nifty faked eye reflections that everything which came before it does, I found a way around this however. When applying the toon shader to a G8 figure, don't apply it to the eyes at all! But be sure to remove any bump maps from the eyes, and disable the diffuse map for the Sclera. Next create a single light in the scene that is soley dedicated to Specualr highlights. When you render the pic, you'll get those highlights without the opacity map older figures used.
I've been having a lot of fun playing with Sketchy Toon for Iray over the last few weeks. The last few days, especially as I've been feeling to sick to do anything else.
Finding hair that looks good with the transmaps turned off, as well as some cartoonish irises really make the style pop.
Trying the new style with varying contrasts.
ooooohhhh I really like that one !!
Thanks!
We need Sketchy tutorial from you @vrba79
Thanks, I made an infographic, which I will translate into a proper tutorial when I find the time.
Here's my attempt at a tutorial.
-The Prep work-
Before applying the shader, we're gonna do some prep work. You can do this before or after your scene is built, or loaded if you already have a scene in mind. Here's something to keep in mind: This really doesn't work great for indoor scenery.
In addition to the shader itself, Sketchy Toon comes with two Render Settings, We want "DTTS Lighting Solid", so apply that. Next we go into the render settings themselves. First thing we're gonna change is in Tone Mapping. Set "Burn Highlights per Component" to Off, this'll make the colors pop better.
Next we go into Enviroment, Set the lighting to Dome Only, and "Environment Intensity" to 2, and if you feel like it, "Ground Shadow" to off.
Go up to Filtering and change "Noise Degrain Filtering" to 1 and "Post Denoiser Available" to On. Two options will appear when you do this "Post Denoiser Enable" and "Post Denoiser Denoise Alpha" set these both to on.
Lastly in Render Settings we're gonna go to "Progressive Rendering" and set the max samples to 150, because with this method that's really all you're gonna need!
I find it saves time to save a blank scene with these settings to use later.
-The Main event-
Okay, so you've got your figure ready. We're gonna be applying the shader itself, and none of the presets. So apply "DTTS Iray Toon Shader Base" to everything. Hold down CTRL to preserve your diffuse maps. Now, if your image suddenly looks like a T-1000 Terminator, it means there are specular highlights turned on. Go ahead and zero all of those. That's our next step anyway!
-The Eyes-
The eyes will look completely white. Set the eye moisture cutout transparency to 0, If you don't have a transmap for the cornea, just set it's cutout transparency to 0 as well, and add your eye highlights in post. Lastly, remove the diffuse map for the Sclera, and set the diffuse color to a color darker than white, but lighter than grey.
-The Skin-
Select the Skin/Lips/Nails surfaces. There's a setting called "Toon Outline Contrast" That's the thickness of your outline. The higher the number, the thinner the outline. We want a thin outline for this, so 70 is the number I use. Next there's a toggle called "Use Traditional Diffuse", we want that off. That's the main ingredient of this secret sauce.
We're gonna change that black color to something darker than the diffuse color/diffuse map. If you're working with human skin tones, go with some kind of dark brown. The three numerical settings under those: Wieght, Normal and Edge, should be "1" "0.7" "1", depending on how dark you want that outer color edge to be, you could also do "0.5".
Next set the "Toon Diffuse Contrast" to 15. Things should be looking closer to how we want it. Follow the same steps for the clothing and hair, choosing an appropriate secondary diffuse color for those.
-The Hair-
I think it makes for a more cohesive look, to choose hair that looks solid. The Toon Generations hair works well for this, but there are certain transmap hair that looks halfway decent with the transmaps(save for the scalp one) turned off. You're gonna need to experiment with that.
-The End-
I'm lousy at making tutorials, but I hope this helped!
I got an interesting skin effect when I played around with the bloom effect setting.
I find one of the keys to this look is that if you're using diffuse textures for the skin, stay away from hyper I-can-see-every-pore-4KUHD textures. I like some detail for stuff like makeup, and certain anatomical details, but as with most things in NPR, simpler is better.
vrba79 Thanks heaps for taking the time to write up and share your tutorial!!
It makes me a little less fearful of Sketchy - I'm going to try these steps out soon...
You're very welcome!