I'm trying to work with Carrara's Toon renderer and I've got some questions: 1) Is it possible to get the Aura/3D Aura filter to work with the Toon renderer? I was hoping to get some glowing objects. 2) The image above shows a lot of pixilation, and I'm getting it in all my tooned images. I've set the Anti-Aliasing to the highest settings and I still get this. Does anyone have any suggestions on cutting this pixilation down? I have some more questions, but I'll save those for later. Thanks!

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 11:07

SmallFry,

It looks like you're using Toon! that comes with Carrara, correct?

1. Toon! and Aura are both post render filters so it changes the effect depending in what order they are run. If you add Toon! to the Scene first, it will probably look the best. If you add Aura to the Scene first, Toon! will interpret the extra glow of Aura as more illumination and just overwrite it with it's effect, but it does leave the Aura that goes outside the edges of an object along which can be neat looking.

2. The buffers that the original Toon! work off of don't include any of the AA information so it does get lost. You can play with it a bit using the Smoothing options, but the best strategy is to render really large and then sample down in your favorite 2D app.

If you plan on doing much cel style rendering in Carrara, you may want to check out Toon! Pro for Carrara 4 and 5. It is a cel shader and line renderer that generate much higher quality images than the original Toon! and has an evaluation mode so you can try before you buy.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara plug-ins

Thanks, Eric!

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try them out and post the results.

I tried Toon!Pro on a Poser figure and it turned the face black... Is this a normal effect of the evaluation mode? I'm strongly considering using it, but am concerned with how it looks with Poser figures. I used to use Lightwave, but its line rendering options left me dissatisfied. Can you point me to any good samples using Poser?

Also, since I have you on the phone (so to speak), I've got another question. I'm looking to create a Toon effect similar to that in the attached Cyclops picture. Basically, it's a Toon way of simulating black where the outer color is a specific color (blue, red, grey, etc.) and the inner color is black. Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

Thanks again!

Ah, the classic technique of showing detail on a black costume. Here's a sample

I set the color channel to black, highlight channel to blue, and shininess was 0, Toon! Pro cel as the lighting model. I then just positioned the lights to bring out the details.

I have some ideas for alleviating the problems with lines blacking out high detail areas (like the eyes of a poser figure), by letting you turn of edges by size, shading domain, or something, but don't have a timeframe for that kind of functionality to be available.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara plug-ins

Seems like with a composite and some post rendering tho you could do it.

Could the black costume technique be done with FakeFresnel and ToonPro? I asked a similar question for Poser 6 over at DAZ's forums and got the following results: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=23300&sid=4e762dce81414b7473806c73721f3f49 Do you think something similar could be done in Carrara?

Brilliant!

Here's a sample. I used the Threshold shader as the parent to Fake Fresnel so you can get a sharp cutoff between the black and blue, no need to fool with the lighting. If you wanted something more gradual, you could use the Curve Filter.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara plug-ins

Yahoo!! That's the ticket! Looks like I'll be getting two plug-in sets then! One question that's occurred to me: is it possible to use both Carrara's Toon and Toon!Pro in a scene? I thought how it might be nice to use one for backgrounds and one for main figures. It'd kind of simulate animated movies in that backgrounds are always rendered differently than the main figures.

You could certainly use them together. There are Toon! and Toon! Pro overrides on the Effects tab so that you could assign which one works on which item.

If you're talking about backgrounds like the thing on the Scene's properties, then neither of them actually do anything to the background or backdrop.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara plug-ins

No, I meant for set props and such. In most cartoons, background sets and props generally don't have outlines while figures do. With ToonPro's seemingly better Line control, I thought it might be more useful for creating outlines for figures. I guess that'll be something to experiment with. Thank you for all of your help.

i'm watching this thread - please post your images when you hane toonpro smallfry. love esther

Esther - I might wait a bit to give my bank account a breather after the recent holidays, but I'll make sure I post something if not here then in my Renderosity gallery. -SmallFry

okay, thanks. Love esther