It's great seeing everyone's images in this thread, hope to see more. ernyoka1 I wanted to mention that your use of comic-like halftone is really cool, I was going to do the same thing but you beat me to it. The default Pixelate > Color Halftone filter in Photoshop could be used with Inkulator to create some 60s comic/Roy Lichtenstein-style art that would be visually compelling. Very, very exciting stuff...

If I have time this weekend, I'll wrestle with it some more. I'm a professional software tester in my day job, so I may be able to really put it through the wringer. :-)

Dressed up the Girl, exported her as Wavefront OBJ w/ only Weld checked. Z-tooned her in Poser (by hand, adjusting obj color as needed). Rendered & saved. Used Inkulator w/ exported OBJ, exported AI and imported to Photoshop 7, where I fiddled with the Poser render and then dropped the ink outline Inkulator created for me onto the Poser image. Needed minor adjustments because somewhere on the way the two renders were slightly rotated differently. Duped the Poser layer and set it to Luminosity.

And then, voila! :)

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 23:39

Animation is exactly what I was thinking of. (But of course animation is the only use of Poser I ever think of, so that's sort of redundant....) I tried to do one manually; move the frame, export the object, run Inkulator, etc. It's fairly fast, but re-entering all the values got extremely tiresome. That's when the snake popped into the picture.

Layering is a great idea. Let Poser do the coloring, let Inkulator do the outlines. That also gives me a neat way to calibrate the Python.......

Z-toon and Inkulator are going to take Poser off in brand new directions, I think :)

@ lhiannan: It's good news that you can layer the pictures. I was thinking of that yesterday but didn't try because I thought the camera angles were too different. Did you use Poser's Main cam or the front cam or what? Your picture looks really really great btw. As taken out of a newspaper or cartoon. Ockham, Poser can output animations as series of obj's, right? I think I tried that once. But maybe that WAS the way you were doing the animation test? And it would still be so cool to have Python pick up the objs one by one, ink them and then (with a yes/no option) delete the obj afterwards, as they wouldn't be needed anymore :o) And some option to match the output to Poser's camera(and lights) would be awesome!

lhiannan (crossposted, so here goes...) z-tooning doesn't flatten the obj, does it? It only makes the colours more "flat" and toonish, right? I didn't think of using z-tooning, but it's a great idea. I can't WAIT to get home tonight and try it! (stuck at work now for the next many many hours :o( )

Thank you :) I didn't Z-toon the obj I exported for Inkulator. The Z-tooning was after and just used in the Poser render, and I think that is what screwed up the camera rotation. Traditional Z-tooning changes the obj, it flattens it on the Z-scale (hence "Z"-toon), making it look like a flat card if seen from the side. I have the Girl parented to an invisible cube and the cube is set to 2% Z-Scale in my render. Camera is the the Main Camera, straight on, 110 focal length.

Well I thought this was going to be too complicated for my wee brain to grasp, but after reading the posts and seeing what people were doing I decided to give it a try. (even forced me to figure out how to export as an obj so I learned something new as well) :)

I will echo the slider/dial rather than text boxes request.

I extracted it to D rather than C and it worked, but crashed on trying to save so I moved it to C and now it freezes trying to save (vs just shutting down completely which is what it did on D).

Any suggestions for getting save to work would be great.

Thank you for sharing this with us. I can see a lot of potential for it with this community.

WoW! Me likes dis a lot!

There are tremendous possibilities for this software. Ran just fine on XP Home. Best wishes for the future as you develop this program.

Oooh now in colours too? This gets better and better. You've got a winner for sure!

Yes, Poser can export a series of OBJ files, if you check "multi-frame" in the first step of the export object action. I'm not sure yet if that will be the best way to go; it would tend to pile up a lot of huge OBJs all at once, and would also require saving a series of command files for Inkulator to process afterward. I suspect it will be cleaner to export the OBJ at each frame, then run the Inkulator separately, then delete the OBJ and delete the command file. The latter would take up less disk space and cause less potential confusion. Will just have to try both ways and see which is happier.

dhenton1000 the inking regions as colour modifier looks great!

Sounds great, I really like the fact that the paths can be edited in Illustrator. Will there be a MAC version available? In graphics MAC is still the industry standard, but on anything 3D we really get the short end...

Torulf, it may be that Anime Doll just won't export well as an .obj file at all, or that the export settings would need to be adjusted to get it to work better. I had the same problem when exporting the infamous Creepy Clown model, but as I recall, I could never get Creepy to export as an .obj anyway without grotesque distortion. In other words, I don't think what you're seeing is inherent to Inkulator. You might try viewing the exported .obj in another non-Poser program to verify.

Torulf, I've noticed similar "stalks" on some of my home-made objects. The polygons that go wrong are many-sided, (as in 32 sides). Poser will usually swallow such facets without complaining, but they're still rotten! Theory: Inkulator may be trying to triangulate such facets with a misplaced center vertex???????

I have importer the Anime doll obj back to Poser and to Cinema 4Dand Bryce and I have no spikes in this aps! Its must be something in Inkulator.

ocham you found my dirty little secret my obj reader truncates multifacted polygons to quads. I KNOW I should tesselate them. I hate to admit this, this is my FIRST graphics program and only my SECOND MFC/C++ program. I have a lot to learn. I can't program on a MAC, but from a programming standpoint, a MAC port would take about a week. This is an OpenGL app,and OpenGL is the same whether mac, linux or windows. if you know any MAC opengl people, ask them.

Moderated list for Inkulator9000 updates and announcements. No images on this one. It will be just for news about new releases or special Inkulator stuff..

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkulator-announce

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Is it me or is this topic getting too big? Should we call it a day or something?

dhenton1000 you could start a new thread if this topic is getting too big.

"dhenton1000 you could start a new thread if this topic is getting too big." LOL

Actually another thread isn't the worst idea. Maybe in a few more days when we've had more time to experiment. The images in this thread are mostly "quickies." It'll be very intersting to see what comes of this given some time. Another observation ... one thing I like about the directional ink controls is that they can be used to simulate consistent light source if you don't set them all to the same value.

Wow!!!!!
This is great!
I been trying for 2 years to get this affect(using PS,PSP)

Larry F

Larry F, your picture might look better with the lines less thick.

LarryF You've hit on one of my secret plans for Inkulator. Style variation. This remains me VERY much of the bookcover art of the Dillons, Leo and Diane. I hope to be able to some day to have a style selector with items like "WoodCut", "Kelly Freas", "Frazetta". Never too late for the party.

Thanks for the feedback. xantor -- you might have a point! It would certainly look DIFFERENT! Once I discovered this thread and read through it, seeing all the examples, I downloaded it and tried it out. I made several renderings, but this was the one I liked most - was looking for a Jesse Marsh (Dell Tarzans circa 50s) and/or Hugo Pratt (CORTO MALTESE!!!!) "look and feel"!! John Bolton even comes to mind, as these are people I really like, among others! At any rate, dhenton1000, replied to your IM and I think you have provided a wonderful gift to Poser folks! I for one appreciate it very very much! Gotta go dig out some of my Dillons - have a couple lying around here somewhere. As this program is so good already - I mean it hit the ground running I'd say - it boggles the mind what you might do with it with time and feedback! Guess I should have brought beer, LOL! Thank you. Larry F

Nice Ent! Was that version 1.5 and is that a texture that makes the grey tones?? I don't own photoshop but I've heard rumors that it handles AI files differently than most other programs (sets white to transparent). The reason that I ask is that it creates an interesting hatch pattern that follows the mesh contours. Now that's slick!!

Sorry I have not replied sooner... This Ent is the version sold HERE...and I just turned him around in the Ink program until he looked more shaded in the "light" and rendered...the result did NOT show this shading...my photoshop did that as it converted the AI file as I opened it.... I did note the file was CMYK.... The Ent mesh had NO texture map applied. This was just my first try in the inking program to see how it worked! :)