I think the Maya anime doll is a fantastic character !!! I play with her for 3 days. First i follow Maya advice and i use Cartoon mode. Results are good.

But the lack of projected shadows is not satisfactory.
I decide to test many options of the Poser 5 "Material room" to simulate the "cartoon mode".

This picture is the result of my test. And it is a Render Picture, not a cartoon mode picture!

Nice girl hum ? :o)

A second test.

destri, would you be so kind as to tell us how on earth you managed to create an anime cartoon pic in the materials room (as opposed to using the cartoon shader)?

I second the request to know how on earth you did that.

Ditto. Comme je l'ai ddit ailleurs : mais comment tu fais ?

It's very simple... hum... :o)

I have follow the excellent advice give by Stewer in this forum about this subject.

I repost the Stewer's picture to explain toon rendering method in material room :

OMG this is SO OBVIOUS! - NOT! It looks great but I would NEVER in my life have figured this out by my self :o/ Ah well, who said Poser 5 was supposed to be easy? Thanks Destri, I'll try this at once :o)

I have this amine doll kit, I want to know how to get the doll to look cartoonish? I can't see it to look that way no matter what lighting set I use for the amine doll kit. --Essie

Maya has a tutorial on his site that shows how you can combine three Photoshop renders with different blending modes to get a good cartoonish result. I don't have the direct link to it, but look on the Maya Doll/Anime Doll-related pages. You can always try my Z-toon method too (in the tutorial section here on Renderosity). :) I've tried the doll with Cinema 4D's cel shader, but there seems to be no way to get it to outline anything but the edges of the figure. Using Illumination just creates heavy banding, which looks worse than Poser's Cartoon with Line mode. Anyone else had better luck with this? SnowS

Took a bit of fiddeling with the lights, but then it ended up quite nicely IMO :o) Thanks for the tip!

Using Stewer's method produces fantastic results! I just created this image with no postwork.

Here's the link to Maya's Anime Doll support page. You can find his tutorial there too. http://www.3digitalcrafts.net/studiomaya/1store/anidol/index.html Above is an image I quickly made using it. I don't quite understand what he means by "Softness filter is performed about 2 from 1", so I used a Gaussian Blur of 2.0 and it looked OK. :) My seam and eye guides for Anime Doll are also in Free Stuff now. Thanks! SnowS

I just discovered something that might be an aid if you choose to use Stewer's toon nodes. As any procedural nodes are invisible untill they're rendered it can be hard to check the actual utcome, and with this toon node, the lightning becomes crucial for the good result. I then discovered that the Cartoon-with-lines mode cast the shadows in the same way as they're rendered on the Toon shader, in other words, whatever is dark grey becomes shaded with the colour you have chosen as shadow. Also, in general, if Cartoon with Lines produces nice outlines, the toon shader will make pretty outlines too. This may be obvious but I though I would share it anyway :o)

I put up 9 different MAT skin shades in the Free Stuff. (Somehow they got approved very quickly.) ;-) Also, SnowSultan's AnimeDoll seam guides are up (thanks a ton, SS!), and I have a few morphs available as well. Enjoy!

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Since you mentioned cartoon with lines, if you want to get tricky, save both versions and go into Photoshop. If you put the cartoon render on top of the toon shade render and set the layer to Multiply, you get more shading. (Other layer blending modes give interesting effects as well.)

I hope you don't mind, ernyoka, but I used your picture as an example:

The left is just toon shaded.

The middle is toon shaded on the bottom layer with the cartoon with lines render on top set to Multiply.

The last version is me getting fancy. The bottom layer is the toon render. The middle layer is cartoon with lines set to Multiply at 100% opacity with the skin on the face and arms erased out. The top layer is cartoon with lines at Multiply with 65% opacity. I think this technique more depth to the picture without muddying the face, like the middle picture did. You can get fancier still by merging the layers and using the smudge tool to make the shadows slightly smoother.

(ernyoka - If you have a problem with my using your pic as an example, please let me know and I'll take this one out and do one of my own! I'm being lazy right now.)

I already have a tutorial on cel shading with Poser 4 and Photoshop on my site. I may have to do a P5 one as well to take the toon shading into account. (http://www.fallencity.net/tut-posi/p-cel1.php)

Cheers!

Not at all crescent :o) On the contrary, I'm flattered G Actually the method you used is the one I've often used in P4, combining either a normal render with a cartoon-with-lines or a z-toon and cartoon with lines, sometimes with a third layer of a normal render too. It does help to bring out the contours. Right now I'm trying to figure out why I can't load ANY of my toon shaders (nor the ones you just uploaded) on a piece of clothing. NOTHING happens when I click it. But perhaps it's just Poser 5 being silly? I must admit that this is the thing that for the first time got me to appreciate that I got Poser 5 at all :o) Otherwise I've been MORE than happy with my PPP. But this toon technique is too cool to let go unused :o) Thanks for the head morps too, they're way cool :o) With the first ear morph the Anime Doll suddely gets a striking resemblence to Link :o) Which reminds me that I forgot all about Link when I did my New Kid in Town pic :o(

Those toon style MATs you just uploaded look very cool Crescent, thanks a lot (even though I can't use them with Poser 4, haha). I'm sure they'll be helpful to a lot of people. Any chance you could make a couple of quick morphs to flatten her chest (for male figures) and smooth the creases around her stomach? Either way, thanks again. ;) SnowS

I know Krys is working on a flat chest morph. Also, on StudioMaya's site, there's a flatter chest morph. If you spin it above 1, it's decent for a male chest, though I'd post work it a bit at some angles.

Here's the morph applied at 1.7 with the chest itself xScaled to 110% with my Jaw2 morph on the face. I think it looks decent for a male anime figure, especially since my guys usually wear clothes. (Even the women do!) ;-)

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Khrys is almost done, Crescent. Just trying to include some other body morphs to make people who don't CARE about the male morph buy it, like making a more young female morph, etc.

The (default) Maya Doll has no eyebrows. With an easy trick you can mix textures with cartoon mode. Add a grayscale texture to the edge blend node. Now you can paint eyebrows or tattoos to the figure too! Mazak

Here the Head texture! Mazak

NICE, Mazak!

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How do you get the lines in the cartoon renders? I tried everything in p5 and i couldnt get them to show up.

xantor it depends heavily on the lights.Try using a toon light, it really helps (there are some included with the anime doll and I've also seen some free ones around) Also I've just uploaded some toon shaders to Free Stuff, I hope they're approved soon :o) They make nice lines IMHO.

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i just do not manage to get it work at all here.. i do not use ps but my paint software got most of the same layer operators and filters (and i can use psp filters as import too) i wish i coul have a better expalined step by step guide, but with pure infography theory rather than strict photoshop terminology now that all the hype is about the anime kit, i am a bit upset cause actually i am broke (cannot buy it) and so i am exluded from the nowadays fun between all mayadoll users

I dont own the 'Maya Anime Doll'. I use the free Maya Doll ;-) straight Poser 5 render no post work on the picture! Mazak

Attached Link: http://www.fallencity.net/tut-posi/p-cel1.php

Mazak,

That technique works great on the Koshini hair! I loaded up the dogtails and put in 2 shades of red for the toon colors then loaded up the b/w bump map in the Image Map area like you showed above. I put the texture strength down to .5 and it lined everything nicely.

Riddokun,

Try my tutorial on cel shading and see if that helps. It has several pictures so it might be easier to figure out the equivalent in your image software. http://www.fallencity.net/tut-posi/p-cel1.php

Cheers!

Here another test with V3. You can use every model you want! With the added grayscale texture map you can create extra ink lines, so it looks like hand painted ;-) Mazak

Mazak that v3 picture is great! It looks like somebody drew it!

Attached Link: http://www.comicbookpage.com/Test/Full_Body_Toon_Render_Test.GIF

I've been playing around with this technique and some some halfway decent results. I used Michael 3 and the M3 Ultra Bodysuit. (The boots are the Buccanner Boots which I used for the simpe reason that they were in the same folder at the bodysuit. I anyone can recommend more super-hero looking boots, I'd appreciate it.) The poke through issues are there because I didn't feel like dealing with all of them. I fixed the issue with the arms sticking through the bodysuit but I didn't notice the issues withthe legs and the boots until after rendering the animation (see above link). I put together a quick texture map for the bodysuit and used the Michael 3.0 Universal Texture Maps (High Res) for Michael. All of the texture maps were run through the Toon node. The black lines on the bodysuit are part of the texture map. And, yes, I do have the M3 Hooded Cloak and it is in the scene but made invisible. I didn't have the time to set up the texture map for it and I'm still somewhat baffled on how to get transparencies working in Poser 5. (I want to make the hood and the fastener part invisible.) The lighting for the scene leaves a lot to be desired. Pointers on how best to light a scene for this technique would be greatly appreciated. All in all, very cool technique. I would be very interested in an indepth tutorial on how to use it to make comic book style renders. I have to say that I can't stand the Poser 5 Materials Room. It is a complete pain to work with. It took forever to set up the nodes how I wanted them.

By the way if it is superman you are rendering, his boots dont have the downturned parts at the top of the boot.

Thanks for the reference image but I already know what Superman looks like. (Kind of hard not to with a collection of around 30,000 comic books...) I've done Superman before in Poser but it was a long, long time ago. (See attached image.) I agree that the bucaneer boots are completely wrong for the super-hero look. Not only at the top of the boots wrong but super-hero boots usually don't have the strap and buckle over the foot either. I used those boots simply because they were in the same library folder and I figures boots would be better than no boots. If someone can point out a more appropriate set of Michael 3 boots, I'd appreciate it. Basically, I was just playing around with the technique and wanted to see how it would work with a texture map. Since I was doing that, I figured I'd go with the classic Superman color scheme. Overall, I think I got halfway decent results. Better lighting would help a lot and that it something I need to play around with when I get the chance.

Here is another image of Superman that I did back in the dark ages with Poser. Poser has obviously come a long way since then. (If only my "artistic" abilities has kept up...)