YAToon with Carrara 7Pro problems
jacktwhitney_014b76bed1
Posts: 0
I searched the forum and was not able to find any thread related to my question so I'm posting a question about using YAToon with Carrara 7 Pro. I'm on a mac running os 10.6.8. I recently found YAToon and installed the SimpleLightingModel.dat, mcx and txt files in the extensions folder as instructed. I'm able to locate YAToon in the pulldown at the Multichannel shader level. But once I select it, my shader becomes flat. The render also shows the shader as flat. I don't know if I'm missing something obvious or if it's a bug on the mac or with this operating system. Can anyone advise? Thanks in advance.
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i dont think it is a version for mac i only see windows on his page
Actually there are 2 for mac. Its under Ver.1.10 OS-X. Carrara 6 and Carrara 7. I'm hoping someone can give some direction on the one for v7.
I've sent the developer a couple emails but I have not gotten any response.
os 10 what?. i think that it was developed for 10.4 or earlier. probably will not work on 10.6.8
That seems odd that it would be developed for 10.4 since OS 10.5 was released ay ear before Carrara 7 was released. Oh well, I was hoping for a solution since YAToon looks to do a better job than Toon Pro.
Isn't a 'toon shader supposed to make a flat look, similar to cell shading or am I missing something? Can you post a screen shot of your render settings and maybe your shaders?
Guess I was not specific enough when I said "flat", and a screengrab is much more helpful. shader01.jpg shows a plastic shader from the library in the shader editor. shader02 shows where I'm changing the setting to YAToon at the top level and shader03 shows how the plastic shader flattens out and no changes in the toon settings makes any change. It stays flat. It renders the same way in my scene.
I'm posting the link to these on my website since putting an image on the forum has too many restrictions-
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/shader01.jpg
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/shader02.jpg
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/shader03.jpg
It is supposed to make it "flat" looking. I'm using the C8 version on Windows and if just put it on a sphere and render it the sphere will just look like a colored cell circle.
If I want it to show in the render that it a sphere done in a "cell style" I need to light the scene differently. :Iight settings and placement will affect how "flat" it looks.
Hi Jack
Out of interest, have you used Toon Pro much?
Edit: I pulled it out to have a go it seems to work pretty well. this is from someone with no experience in the software. Just doing a line render is worth the costs of admission. you are also aware of VectorStyle?
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/vectorstyle-2-for-carrara
Love the dog on your site :)
OK, I've put a few more jpegs up at my site to illustrate my dilemma with YAToon. A while back I modeled a portrait of Arnold as Conan. In these examples I created the background separately in Painter and was hoping to render him in comic style to fit the background more.
This one was done with Toon Pro using both cell shaders and Toon render.
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/conanToon01.jpg
This one uses only the Toon render
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/conanToon02.jpg
This one uses the YAToon extension and when I said "flat" I meant without form and color.
http://www.jackwhitney.com/toonIssue/conanToon03.jpg
So I'm not sure what is causing the problem. I only wish I could use it as well as Toon Pro. By the way, I do know know about the Vectorstyle Plug in. I contributed the artwork of the robot T Rex and claw with the sphere for the box cover.
Oh and thanks for the compliments on the dog. He was modeled in Hexagon and rigged/rendered in Carrara with the NPR render settings.
pleasure
It's good to see someone making use of these things commercially.
On your Yahtoon problem _ I think it is actually making arnie more attractive ;)
But seriously - it ;looks like it is setting the alpha channel to zero.
you could try asking bcrice- he has been posting toon things in different places eg http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/8123/
Try cranking up the scene's ambient light if you haven't tried that yet.
Looks like an alpha channel issue.
YAToon is a lighting adjustment whereas Toon Pro is a an actual shader, yeah? Maybe people don't differentiate between the two.
Oh and a trick (I guess) for Toon Pro.
Put highlights to 1000 on flesh and fabric; and pretty much leave alone for leather and metals. That way you won't get that funky reflection on skin.
Bottom slider I knock to 50 for everything besides flesh, which I always knock up to 80.
Someone just posted in a different thread about morphing shaders. A guy was basically asking how to move his shader from normal skin to wolf an skin in the timeline. The answer he got was something about a multi shader hierarchy where you could slider between them? I'll have to look at it again because I too have always liked the idea of blending Toon Pro with YAToon. I can do it in PS, but then it's like saving two global shaders with two different shade styles and rednering twice, etc.
Right now in Carrara about the closest I've come to "blending" the two is to use Toon Pro on clothing and prop textures and use YAToon on flesh in the same model. But that's not really blending.
The other images helped cause I wasn't able too see the problem at first.
I spent the last 2 days doing searches and trying to duplicate the problem in Carrara 8 Pro so I could figure out what was going on.
The "flatness" is caused by the color(s) being too dark and it looks like the image is just flat, unless you examine it very carefully. I discovered this by looking at the plastic shader images and by various experiments to try and replicate them.
While experimenting I was able to get some test shaders and to have a dark flat look, but not to the level in your images.
Adjusting the Brightness & Specular settings of YAToon in the shader, and the Highlight and Shyness values of the shader may help.
Depending on how those were set I found would make shader have a flat dark look.
Just changing the top shader in C8 to YAToon isn't making it as dark as in the images you posted with the version of YAToon I'm using. I had to adjust the settings I mentioned to get it flat and dark looking. So the version of YAToon for C7 you are using appears to be bugged.
The C8 version is 1.20 and has a Checker and Color Balancer files that are added to the Extensions folder. All the older versions don't have versions of them. So the version you're using may need to have a version of them added to it so it will show the shader will look right.
The creator of YAToon last year on the forum said that a 1.21 or 1.30 version would come out for C8.5 at some point. To fix some problems when using it with C8.5. So development and work on YAToon isn't dead as far as I can tell.
You could try and contact the creator of YAtoon via Renderosity too, if contact via the YToon site doesn't work.
http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?userid=203102
Age of Armor made some free toon shaders for Carrara that you could try out I discovered while researching the problem with YAToon.
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/downloads/aoa_toon_shaders.0.0.0.1.zip
Love your Arnold, I remember seeing him and some of you work on my Carrara 5 Pro Handbook disk.
Also, since combining YAToon with ToonPro got mentioned the creator of YAToon did that for several images you can see on the Renderosity site.
Wish I could have found out some more and an exact fix to the problem.
I checked out the YAToon creator's gallery. It appears that he never actually managed to blend Toon Pro and YAToon; he simply used YAToon and then rendered using Toon Pro's line art function.
The issue with Toon Pro (if there is one) is sort of the opposite issue that YAToon poses, which is why it'd be great to get them working together.
Toon Pro is really only worthwhile as a shader if you keep it to 2 tones. If you keep it 2 tone, it's great. The problem with Toon Pro is in it's shading and response to colors. If you take a white light and change it to, say, dark blue or red, those colors will not show up in your render; they'll only darken the existing colors that Toon Pro has decided will be your toon (2 tone) color palette. So if you change your light to blue, it's the same as taking your white light and dropping it down to 80% or whatever.
Additionally, Toon Pro needs a definitive light source. If your character is in shadow, you can kiss your 2 or three or 6 tones goodbye. You get a single, dull flat color and that's it. To me this is the worst thing about Toon Pro because it essentially eliminates its use as a standalone shader in Carrara. If you want your character creeping into a dark room lit by a reddish glow, you have to render that character on full blast under white hot lights and then take it into a secondary program (like PS) to bring in the darkness and the reds.
Personally I think it's probably a stretch to believe that we can have YAToon and Toon Pro working in the same render as shaders. In my experience they pretty much demolish one another when you load them. But like I said, someone was talking about "transitioning" between shaders within a single set of keyframes via using some kind of slider designated specifically for a shading domain. Now, is that specifically for certain *kinds* of shaders? Dunno. But I'll keep looking into it.
And just to really quickly extrapolate on why YAToon would be helpful and why it's really not strong enough on its own -- unlike Toon Pro, it's 2 tone capabilities, IMO, are pretty weak. It has a very digitally/pixelated quality to it, especially when in motion. I was able to get around this issue by diminishing the specularity darkness almost entirely. I don't have it in front of me, but I believe my Carrara YAToon numbers were something like...
100 10
5 0
70 100
20 83
I might have those mixed up and I can't remember what any of them mean except for 83 is for brightness. If I missed two boxes (if there's 10, not 8), they'd both be 100s.
Going this route gives a nice soft shade, but the other issue with YAToon is that it completely distorts the original color, whereas Toon Pro does a decent job preserving it.
So for instance, I would render something out using YAToon, and then I'd have to go into PS and like create a flesh colored filter and just slap it on some ghostly white skin. Not the best way to work unless all of your characters are wearing black.
And in all honesty, I pretty much gave up on the process. I spent a good two months experimenting with different styles between YAToon and Toon Pro, and in the end I decided that there was no way to get an effective toon shading for *motion* inside of DAZ/Carrara on traditional M4/V4 figures. Including using Toon Pro's line renderer, which is death to anything creative you might want to do using existing, say, clothing.
For backgrounds and solid objects, Toon Pro set at 2 tones is amazing. But for M4/V4 tooned? I don't much believe in it. I can create some nice images using Toon Pro or YAToon along with PS, etc, but for moving images, you need something else to assist these products.
I've tried AE's toon filter with YAToon and Toon Pro each. Nasty results.
FlyingDutchman (everyone knows) did a great looking PWToon-to-Anime Studio Pro render. But when you get into the depth of time it takes to animate and render something; to have to do it over and over again for a single shot is pretty extensive. Imagine how long it takes to animate and render a scene in Carrara (even using motion capture), and then multiply that by at least three steps (if you have the right programs and filters), and that's the kind of workload you'd be looking at. And, realistically, the only sure fire solution for animation would be:
Toon Pro Render
YAToon Render
AE filter and blend
Rotoscope final character artwork
It's either that or FlyingDutchman's
Traditional Render
Toon Render
Blend Render
Anime Studio Render
Final Blend Render
I made the decision to abandon Carrara Toon style animation and instead just apply what I've learned to still images, which I'm transforming into a motion comic in AE. To me, either motion comic or separating the pieces of an image into individual symbols for Flash style animation are the only two viable options. Anything animated solely in Carrara or DAZ in the "toon" style is probably going to leave you less than thrilled -- which isn't okay considering the amount of work that's required to animate.
But like I said, toon shaders with some post tweaking is completely solid. This image is largely Toon Pro just doing it's thang.
FYI this is what Head Wax said in a different Carrara thread for transitioning shaders:
"In the shader room at the top of the hierachy of your shader choose Multi shader Mixer.
For source 1 choose one of your shaders, ditto for the second source, then for mixer chooise the 0-100 slider,
You should be able to animate/transition the shader by sliding this slider"
Not sure if this will apply to YAToon X Toon Pro. Though I'm anxious to try it out when I get home.