Taking the idea of parenting the scene to one cube one step further: Two cubes! Create two cube props, cube_1 and cube_2, and a figure. Then create the following hierarchy: -Universe ...-cube_1 ......-cube_2 .........+Figure_1 Then animate Figure_1 and the Camera just as you would usually. Start with a simple camera animation, e.g. just a 360 degree rotation around the y axis. Then carefully animate cube_1's rotation so that its front face is always pointing at the camera. Next, apply the inverse rotations to cube_2 - when cube_1 has a keyframe with (0,90,0) rotation, set a keyframe to cube_2 with (0,-90,0). Finally, set the z-scale of cube_1 to your desired "flatness". This could easily be automated with a Python script.

Bookmark. This looks interesting >^_^

lol Damn! I am still having trouble learning lights. I think I will wait a bit till I try something like that. I bookmarked it though. Thanks Stew :)

I made a similar suggestion in a couple other threads. I find though, that it's easier to keep track of what you're doing if you use a different primitive instead of cube_2, like a Sphere. Also you can use the second primitive to simulate camera movement by simply leaving the camera static and moving the primitive to move the scene around in the opposite direction you want the camera to seem to be moving.

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/Stewerflat.zip

"This could easily be automated with a Python script. " Indeed it can! Works like a charm. Each time you hit the script, it does this: 1. Looks through all Figures and makes sure that each one is equipped with an inner and outer cube. Any figure that is already equipped, we leave alone at this stage. 2. For each frame and each figure, applies Stewer's rule to the inner and outer cubes. Basically, you should set up your figures and your animation frames as usual, then hit the script once. I suspect it will work best with the Main and Aux cameras, but you can try others.

Couple more notes. You don't need animation frames to use it; just put your figures, move the camera to desired angle, then hit the script. I used an arbitrary Z-scale of 5% (0.05) for flattening. This is in the very last line of the script, so if you want other scales, just change the 0.05 to 0.02 or whatever.

bookmarking

Darken: If you want to do it with spheres, just edit the script to change every box to ball

This seems to work great! Thanks, Ockham!

I'm not using it for animation, just for automating this and it works great for that. Just one thing though. It doesn't understand props, just figures, right? I had to flatten the scene props I added myself (and I didn't do as good a job of that as your script).

I loaded up Koshini and ran the script. Then added the props and ran the script again. Nothing changed. Then I added Gobbles, and ran the script again and Gobbles flattened out very nicely.

Your script makes things sooooo easy!

Spit, you're right... I skipped props. Trying now to add them, but it's surprisingly difficult. One-piece props are no problem, but a PP2 that includes a hierarchy is trickier than it might seem. I'll get there soon, though.

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Stewerflat.zip

Made it work with props. Also changed the 'controlling element' to spheres instead of cubes, because I recall that parenting to a sphere causes less distortion than a cube. Same link, new content.

I think eventually this will evolve into a ToonShop type of application for Poser and DAZ Studio. I think when people really start seeing the results a lot more people will be doing this and making further tweaks. Aside from single images, there's video animation applications and website Flash and Gif animations. I've also created my own "Z-Illustration" tweak using Vicky and PT, three lights and other highlight adjustments for single image illustration work. For animation it would create a beautiful new animation look. More people need to play with this idea!

Just for curiosity, has anybody tried a hybrid flattening, say 50% of the flattening done by flattening the figures/props and 50% by Z-axis of camera? It might even be interesting to only flatten the figures by 50% of the total, then use 50% camera Z-axis flattening to get some flattening of the props, but less than for figures. Dale LaRoy Splitstone

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Thanks....will play in a bit! Use the first link, second pops a 404.

This works great!

Would it be possible to name the cubes for the main figure or prop they are 'attached' to instead of numbering them?

Otherwise it's next to impossible to figure out which cube to un-Z that's attached to the Ground or floor prop you don't want Z'd. (is that what you do, anyway? un-Z the cube?)

For example, in the picture above there's a floor and rug prop that would be good to un-Z. Thanks!

Maybe have an un-Z'd cube as the parent to which the floor and rug are children as well as the Z'd cube? Dale LaRoy Splitstone

Actually the easiest would be not to add a floor or ground to the scene until you're all z'd. But that kind of defeats the purpose of being able to run the script again and again if you rotate. :) Have you tried the script? You don't have to add any cubes yourself...it's all automated! I just want to easily find the cube the floor, for example, is attached to. I've been loading up old scenes and running the script. No preparation necessary!! It's great!

I mean spheres, not cubes, they're spheres now. don't want to confuse anyone.

Good question. My initial thought was to name the cubes (actually Balls now) after the items, but I wondered if Poser could get confused. The "external name" that you see in the menus is not always the same as the name that an object came in with, and I wasn't sure if Python could make the distinction. I'll try it that way and see what happens. It's certainly true that some rectangular-style props look better without the flattening.

Should the GROUND be automatically omitted from the "balling"?

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/stewerflat.zip

Okay, made the change. Seems to work just as well. (May be a bit faster, in fact, because tacking on a name is easier than searching for the next available number!) I didn't automatically exclude GROUND. Same link, new content.

After playing with this for a while, I find myself wishing that SnowSultan (or somebody) had invented it earlier. This style would have been a splendid option for my educational animations, in which Posette is mixed with some things that are "real" and some other things that are sort of cartoonish. The Z-toon style would signal the viewer's eye that this image is not meant to be strictly real.

PERFECT. Absolutely PERFECT! Thank you! (Just select the 'A' ball for the prop you want to un-Z and set zScale back to 100.) Yes, this would have been perfect for your anims! Well, better late than never :)

Good. I'll add a readme to the zip and post in freestuff.

This works great for website Flash animation! My SWF look much better than before. I also own "Illustrate" for 3DStudio, and I think this Z-Toon technique could become a really high quality Cel Shader effect with many commerical art and animation applications. What needs to be created in the future are special MAT settings for characters like Koshini, Vicky, etc., then using Ockham's Python script and character MAT's, Toon-Illustration Light Sets, people would start getting consistant results and you would really see this start to take off!

Attached Link: http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/z-flatten.zip

The freestuff link is different from the earlier versions listed above. I deleted the earlier ZIPs on my website to avoid use of not-so-good versions. Proper link (same as freestuff) is this one.