Okay, it's bad enough that I find the Sketch Designer very counterintuitive, but my real problem is that I just can't seem to find a way to sketch, in any mode, without getting those damn lines around the edges of everything, whether it should be visible from the camera's angle or not. I really DON'T want to see the entire globes of the characters' eyes, nor the outlines of their tongues and teeth, and I don't need to see the armpits on the far side of the figure; I wouldn't see these if I were actually sketching anyone, so I don't see why this seems to be a default in the sketch designer.

I've found a couple of presets that manage to create images without these stupid lines, but the presets are for styles that I really don't care for; it's a sketch designer, after all, and that's what I'd like to end up with, not a painting. I'm just looking to make a simple line drawing of the image as it would actually be seen from the camera's view, with no x-ray abilities and not covering every square millimeter with a brush- or pencil-stroke, but something looser and a bit more complex than simply using cartoon-mode.

Unfortunately, none of the tutorials nor the manual have been very helpful in this matter. I hope that someone here has practical, working knowledge and can make this clear.

Thanks for your help, folks!

bookmark here : I wish I'd know...

Yeh .. I've been working on a Cartoon and Anime tool-kit (should be with Daz very shortly). I found these hidden lines occur as a result of certain props. For instance, working with Koshini, I found her hair causes hidden lines to show up in sketch renders. Just making the prop invisible solves the problem. Some clothes have the same effect, but not all. The answer is messy, but works ... do two renders. One with everything visible and one with the offending prop (or props) invisible. Then tidy up your lines in post work. Why do some props cause this to happen and others don't? Haven't a clue. I've been through the files carefully to find the anomaly, without success. Bizarre.

Thanks for the point in the right direction, moochie. That's VERY strange; are you saying that an offending prop anywhere visible in the scene causes this to happen even to characters that are not related to it? How bizarre!

Well, I'll try this and see what the results are; it certainly can't hurt :-D

The Sketch feature was actually the primary reason I purchased Poser many years ago. I've had the program since it was on Windows, which was Ver 2 I think. But Ver 3 was when the real sketch stuff started showing up when they started showing those weird mechanical characters in sketch mode as a Poser promo. Those characters still come with Poser, I think. Anyway, the Sketch Render feature REALLY takes some time to learn, as the documentation on it is almost ZERO. It has taken me a few years, off and on, to really get a handle on what it does and can do. Frankly, it is a work of GENIUS in my opinion. They are some of the best art painting filters EVER! It goes back to when the Fractal Design folks were working on ideas like Painter 3D, which also was a great idea never quite completed well. Ironically, the Sketch Render feature was once considered the PRIMARY direction and use of the early Poser. Poser was meant to be a studio artist's model. That's also why you have that old goofy stick-figure guy that almost nobody ever uses. But Poser marketing folks quickly learned that NAKED BABES was the hot ticket to selling Poser, and that has become its primary market direction. Because most people have never quite understood or gotten the hang of the sketch render features, Poser 4 and P5 have NEVER corrected some of the technical problems with Sketch Renders, primarily that that can't render larger than your monitor desktop setting. However there are several tricks around that. I think I may have been the first person to inform Metacreations tech support about a work-around, which they usually passed on to those few others that actually had an interest in doing sketch renders. But the programming talent- primarily one or two people with Painter-Fractal Design, all left with the pending desolution of Metacreations, and nobody has ever picked up the ball since. Too, bad, as I still think sketch renders are awesome and could be made into at least a new powerful plug-in for... DAZ STUDIO???

Attached Link: 1.4 meg windows media file

I have a sketch render tutorial at the DAZ Arcana site. Look in Free Stuff for some sample Presets.

Sorry to say it, Don, but I found that tutorial and the presets a couple weeks ago, and while the presets have some useful outputs, the tutorial was no more helpful nor productive than me sitting there fiddling with the controls on my own. The complete lack of supporting illustrations and examples made it useless to me, and checking the illustrations at the provided link also added nothing, as they were both too small, and irrelevant to the discussion, not to mention the headache of navigating the site. A tutorial for something this arcane really does need screen shots of teh settings, along with the accompanying output, so the user can see what the results of a change can be; otherwise, it's like handing someone a set of tools and a box of parts and bolts, and telling them nothing more than that they can build a car just like the one sitting in the next garage stall.

The SDR really does seem like a leftover in this program, something they played with and just left in, more of an obvious Easter Egg than an intentional application. It's too bad that it seems capable of quite a bit, and yet is so poorly documented and implemented. I guess the best I can really hope for is spending a great deal of time trying every possible setting and seeing what results; if I commit to it to that extent, I may just write my own tutorial ;-).

I forgot to mention too, and probably few people know, or have tried it, is that Poser EXPORTS a Painter script file, which Painter can import and does it "auto-painting" routine. However, it never looks the same as how it looked in Poser. It really depended on exactly which brush setting you used in Painter as to how it would be rendered. It's another thing I've played around with and thought that it had lots of interesting potential. Someday maybe the curious and brilliant mind of SnowSultan might figure this all out and give us another great tutorial. I think the whole concept is another great idea that someone will eventually follow up on.

render image in regular 3d form,save as tiff,clear the scene or restart poser,open one sided square prop,apply saved image to one sided square,position square so lines don't show,set camera position so all you see is saved image,render away with chosen sketch preset.this is also the only way i've been able to figure out how to get shadows to show with SD.

The eyes are separate objects. Use the heirarchy window to uncheck what objects you don't want before you start sketching. Also note at the top of the sketch designer window on the right are three 'tabs'. From what you've written it doesn't look like you've noticed these. The main body of parameters applies to whichever 'tab' you're working with: Objects, Background, or Edges. If you enable the one on the right (Edges) you can set the line max and line min to 0 and get no edges at all.

If there is any thing with transparency turned on in the scene it will mess up the sketch render. Turn of transparencies and that should solve a lot of your problems. Like Spit said you can also adjust edges in the sketch designer window.

One more thing: You vcan easily make a sketch render larger than your workspace: Simply render a 1 frame animation with "current sketch settings" applied :o)

Thank you thank you thank you! I was about to throw my monitor out the window. :) I hadn't noticed the three tabs either. Hurrah!