Anybody tried it, how's the result? Any rendered images you could show us? Thanks

Heres one - taking the default settings from the toon script.

I don't particularly care for the new Toon Outline render option for Firefly. I'll admit that it creates some nice, bold lines, but they're too jagged. I haven't figured out how to antialias them. We also need an option to disable the outlines for specific materials.

Yep, way to bold and way too jagged of an outline. I like the preview options as well but they don't use the texture at all so it leaves me wondering what I can do.

Here's a quickie of Alpha Man with toon render... I didn't use the outline options though since I couldn't reduce the thickness of the thin pen value...

You can control which materials get outlines using the toonID setting on the materials settings. As an example, for Jessie with the seperate head and body materials, normally a line appears across the neck. If you set the head and body to have the same ID, no line.

Certainly helps around the eyes etc. It also means you can create extra outlines using the grouping tool - create a new group that contains the area you want outlined, assign a new material. Copy across the original material, but change the ID. When you render, your new patch is now outlined - good for enhancing the lips for instance.

One option for anti-aliasing - make all the materials invisible, then render with the outline on - all you get is the outline, which you can then blur in another package and merge with the unoutlined version.

A wacro to do this will follow - works OK, but fails if transmaps are used - I'll fix it then post it.

Thanks a lot for those replies.

JohnRickardJR THANK YOU!!! I was convinced that the global inker was useless, now you have made it VERY useful. IMO The, default P6 cel shader is too soft. I still use my old settings which were derived from shaders posted by Stewer, Crescent, and Trekkiegrrl.

Thanks. I'll post the script once I've got it to remove transmaps. If you look in the Python forum, there is an earlier version there, along with a version of the toon wacro that works on all materials in a scene.

One other option I was about to play with earlier, before a complete system hang (and work) was to render to double the target size, then use Photoshop to reduce the size down, hopefully anti-aliasing the outline as it went. However, the seperate outline idea might be more useful - you could change the line colours, blur it, sharpen it, whatever you want!

Personally, I hope that in the first service patch they change the toon outliner in Firefly to take account of the preview settings for width and anti-aliasing - the instruction book almost implies that.

Another possibility that occurs to me is to render the toon as normal without the outline at your target resolution, then turn everything invisible and render that at double size, no shadows etc. Scale down the outline to get the anti-aliasing, then merge it with the toon

Rendering just the outline, then smoothing and compositing it in post, is a brilliant idea. But I'd still like it to antialias within Poser itself, and save me that step. Especially for animation.

Here are the scripts needed. They must both be placed in the WacrosUserDefined folder. This first one should be run from the drop down list of user defined wacros. It will replaced the standard buttons with my buttons. The bottom button will restore the normal buttons. We need to do this to get the shift-click functionality. The second script MUST be renamed invisible.py and placed in the same folder. Run this from the buttons to get shift-click, or from the dropdown list if you only want to set one material

Here is the invisible.py script. Let me know if it works for you

I'm curious about these so called jaggies... Using the pen settings I'm not getting them, Marker looks jaggy, and I havn't tried pencil. But the pen outlines are just as smooth as my figures when rendered. (2x Gaussian post filter) another interesting thing about the line being too thick... when I rendered with an alpha channel the medium pen line was faded out to the point of nearly being invisible, so I went with thick, and it looks great. very strange. Anyway thanks a million for the Toon ID thing. This is really going to revolutionize the way I do Cel shading in Poser. It took some experimenting, to get everything to look right but it works.

Hmm .. What kind of settings are you usng Berserga? I am just wondering since I have bad jaggies and oo thick at the thinnest.

Like I said, 2x Gaussian for the post filter. It might be the resolution I am rendering at? anyway the thin pen looks pretty thin to me in poser. Thick looks pretty thick in poser, but when I export a .png as thick it looks about right.

What kind of resolution are you rendering at? That might be it. The quassiian will haelp the jaggies and might help the thickness but I am just trying to figure out how to get it so the line doesn't cover all bits of skin on fingers etc.

Setting the finger nails to the same toonID as the body skin helps - that gets rid of one line. Heres another suggestion for CL - how about saving the outline as a seperate layer if you export as PSD? (It doesn't - I've checked)

Doing a test, I can't see any difference at all in the jaggies with any post filter settings - they seem to happen during the render, and before the lines are drawn - the only difference is that the slight bluring of the edges of a post filter pushes the lines a little further away from the surfaces.

well this is very strange... Like I said Marker, setting looks quite jaggie, but pen is smooth.

when I zoom in on the rendedred image it definately appears as if the lines are antialiased. shrug... For the current render I am rendering at 1500x844. Maybe the inside was jaggie, and something in the process of exporting with alpha channel smoothed off the outer edge? (This would also explain why the thick pen looked thin after export)

anyway I am happy with the global toon outliner, for the most part. One bad thing about it, It won't cut into inner surfaces of the same ID at all, so Like if an arm, passes in front of the body it has no line between the arm, and the chest. This is a minor annoyance. (Of course if the figure has clothes on this won't be a problem... but my tests have been nude thus far)

I've found that Making a toon shader with no outline of it's own for most of the body is a good idea, then I have used Stewer's shader structure that generates it's own outline for the face and hands, so that some inner details show up better. (But still all the same Toon ID)

I find it frustrating that the preview toon outline does a perfect job of showing off the right lines, without overdoing it (except those damn transparent areas.) while the global inker only inks the outside of the material. I experimented yesterday with exporting a 1 tone toon preview, and color keying the white out (In mirage) so that I was left with just a line that I could overlay. It worked, but it had drawbacks of it's own... I may try that technique again, but with the preview pass being at a MUCH higher res to make the keying smoother.

Message edited on: 04/06/2005 07:55

Ya know the preview toon mode is in fact so good that if they had just made it so you could make a material fully transparent (eyelashes) I'd just use it 90% of the time... You can even change the line width in preview now, and that can DEFINATELY be antialiased.

Of course with a model made specifically for cel shading, Like Anime doll or F202 you could. But Aiko uses transmaps. :(

Message edited on: 04/06/2005 08:02