Ockham and Stewer might have some interesting ideas about this, since Ockham has written the Py Script and Stewer wrote the Flash Exporter for Pro-Pack- This is from an Alias website product called Inkworks: ******************************************************* *Assign Inkworks cartoon material to 3D models *Choose base, shade and highlight color *Determine the extent of shade and highlight *Control the sharpness and smoothness between the colored regions *Animate color and line thickness *Control the generation of ink lines by choosing placement of edge lines, fold lines and region lines *Treat ink lines and paint regions separately *After Inkworks materials have been assigned and the model rendered, you can use the cartoon shaded model within your 3D production. ******************************************************** So- My question is, if we now have Z-dimensional objects, and full frontal lighting, is it now a matter of assigning the correct MAT material to Poser characters and objects? If Sketch Render can do outlightline drawings on Poser characters, then would that, plus the correct MAT assignments equal a cel shaded drawing look? It seems that looking at output from Illustrate! and other Cel Shader output from MAX and Lightwave programs that this is really a technique that Poser could in fact produce, with the correct settings.

Shockwave3D, not Flash.

(Sorry Stewer, I sometime confuse Flash with Shockwave3D, since they are both Macromedia products However, I use SWISH for my website work, with some of the SWF output from Pro-Pack, but that's O.T.) But what has me really intrigued about this cel shading idea is that I remember when Allerluiah (or however her name was spelled) produced the first transmapped hair for Poser, and it blew everyone's socks off. Koz developed this into a tutorial and a great line of free transmapped hair- BUT, my point is- Poser ALREADY could do this, and it only took someone to show HOW it could be done, borrowing basically I'm sure from knowledge gained from using 3DStudio or Lightwave. It seems to me high quality Cel Shade art and animation is entirely possible in Poser, since we are already half the way there now with Z-Axis rendering. Isn't the other half basically the correct assignment of material settings?

There are endless possibilities in the material room for non-photorealistic rendering. What's missing in the material room is an edge detection for some outlining, but this can be done with either the cartoon line mode or special shaders and a little postwork. e.g. the attached image is a Poser 5 rendering, no post.

This one's a little more complicated - two layers. One's a toon shader made in the material room, the second one is the outlines which were extracted with a few filters in the gimp.

Last one for today, I need some sleep. Again, no postwork in this one.

Stewer, THANKS! This has already got me re-thinking what could be done in the Poser Material room. Just wondering if any MAX or LIGHTWAVE users out there have experience with Cel Shaders and if any of these ideas could be brought into Poser?

What I am wondering is whether Z-Toon is portable to other applications. In particular, I have read that Cararra 2.x has a fast rendering engine with high quality. Cararra 3.0 seems to be focusing a great deal on non-photorealistic rendering (although they claim to have also improved photorealistic rendering), and claim that rendering is 3-5 times faster than in Cararra 2.x. It seems that getting Cararra 3.0 (or even just 2.1), would be worthwhile just for rendering speed and quality alone, but would I lose the potential of Z-Toon? Dale LaRoy Splitstone

Sure it is. I've done it in Bryce. There's one in my gallery though it isn't strictly 'toonin' it's z-ing. I've found the easiest thing to do in Bryce, anyway, is to select everything in the scene except the ground plane and camera, group, then set the zSize to some very small amount. As in Poser, setting materials (bump, diffusion, ambience, etc.) will change the look.