Heya. I already posted about this on the official Daz 3D forums, but a friend of mine has recommended that I post about it on other forums as well so that more people may know about it. I'm known as BishounenTaurus over at Daz 3D, and not too long ago I released my first ever Daz 3D product. That product was Visual Style, a highly customiseable toon shader for Daz Studio 4, available here: http://www.daz3d.com/shop/visual-style-shaders/

After the success of that shader, I decided to make another artistic shader for Daz Studio 4. This shader is still in progress.

Manga Style
Shaders for Daz Studio 4

This is the sequel to my popular Visual Style anime shaders. Like before, I have taken inspiration from Japanese art and media when creating this shader. More specifically; Manga.

This shader aims to recreate the look of Japanese Manga screentones. It takes all of the lighting and texture information of an object, and outputs a dynamic screentone design, just like the ones used in Manga.

Completely untouched render. I repeat, NO POSTWORK. The special effects were done using Jepe's PlateZ rendered with Screentoned Opacity.

Features

Screentones
This shader can accurately recreate the screentone effect used in Manga. Screentones are pure black and white patterns which, when viewed from afar, look like various shades of greyscale. As an example, your typical dot pattern will use smaller dots for lighter shaders of grey, and larger dots for darker shaders of grey. Screentones have a very distinctive look to them, a look that has become iconic to the point of imitation.

The screentone effect is fully customisable:

-You can customise the size of the screentone by changing the tiling amount. Smaller sizes will produce finer and noisier patterns common in manga, while larger sizes will produce more of a pop-art effect.

-You can customise the tolerance of the screentone. Say you're using Hitomi with her default textures. Naturally, because her texture is light skin coloured, the screentone by default will treat it as light grey. Usually you would have to alter the texture yourself to get it to work with such a shader, but with Manga Style you can fix this simply by turning down the tolerance of the screentone pattern.

-You can customise the pattern of the screentone. The pattern works of a gradient map, and as such any grayscale image can be used. Manga Style comes with a bunch of gradient maps for dots, lines, and cross-hatching, as well as various freehand patterns for a more traditional hand-shaded look.

Outlines
Manga Style comes with an edge_blend based outline like most other toon shaders. The difference lies in the fact that the outline width can change depending on light and shadow. This recreates the traditional method of inking, using thicker lines in darker areas to emphasise the lighting. If that's not enough, Manga Style also comes with "Shadow Emphasis", a pure black shadow that can be used to further emphasise darker areas.

Shading
Manga Style is, at it's heart, a toon shader. As such, similar to Visual Style, Manga Style comes with a fully adjustable cel-shading effect that can be made sharper or softer.

However, whereas Visual Style was a duo-tone shader, Manga Style is now a tri-tone shader. This means that instead of have only two tones (Base and Shadow), you now have three (Base, Shadow, and Darker Shadow). Paired with the aforementioned "Shadow Emphasis", this brings the number of possible shades up to four.

And that's not all, each of the three tri-tone shades can have different screentones applied to them. This works best when used with the line/cross screentone patterns; use a single diagonal line pattern for one shader, and a crossed pattern for another, and you get the effect of cross-hatching. You can see this in the included Hulk render.

Opacity
Opacity maps have always been a bit of a burden for toon shaders. Most of the time using an opacity map (such as the ones included with most hairstyles) would break the toon style of an image. On the other hand, most hairs are designed to work best with opacity maps.

Manga Style overcomes this by providing not one, but two ways to render objects with opacity.

Outlined Opacity
This mode will take whatever opacity map is plugged into the surface, sharpen it, and then generate an adjustable outline. This works great on hairstyles with thick opacity maps (such as Hitomi's hair), or clothes that have holes ripped into them (such as Mr.Hyde's jeans).

Screentoned Opacity
This mode will take whatever opacity map is plugged into the surface, and generate a screentone pattern based on your existing settings. This allows the object to gently fade out and blend with the rest of the image. Optional soft edge tinting is included in case the object becomes hard to see. This works best on detailed hair using thin opacity maps (such as the Gregoria hair), special effects (such as Jepe's PlateZ), and anything that is semi-transparent.

Basic Colouring
For lovers of Lichtenstein and Golden Age comics, Manga Style comes with basic colouring features. There are three colours; the base, the screentone, and the outline (including Shadow Emphasis). These also take textures, allowing you to achieve some interesting pop art effects.

Images
To view these images at full size, click on them.

An early render showing off some of the included digital patterns. Postwork: Resize and composition.

This render shows off the shader's ability to use different screentones on different shades (to create a cross-hatch effect). This also shows off some of the included freehand patterns. What's more, this render uses all three of the tri-tone shades, as well as the Shadow Emphasis. Postwork: Composition.

A render inspired by Lichtenstein, using the basic colouring features. Also noticeable is the outlined opacity on the hair (that is the default female hair that comes with Daz Studio 4).

Excellent!  Will these only be for DS4? or will they work with DS3 as well?

I boughht your first VS shader pack and it's incredible!

-AniMajik

Unfortunately, shaders produced for DS4 don't work in DS3. Same the other way around (hence why numerous shaders, such as pwSurface, needed to be updated for DS4).

And i'm glad you liked VS. :3

just curious you have to write code to tell DS how to render all these right?

Nope. This shader was built using Daz Studio's Shader Mixer, and like all Daz Studio shaders features plenty of user friendly parameters for easy customisation. No coding required.

ooo these are great

I really like the cross-hatch effects in the 2nd example.  Do you have any other images showing more examples of that shader?

-AniMajik

Here is an older render which shows the cross-hatch effect, this time with the straight pattern as opposed to the scribbly pattern. Click for bigger size. :)

Very nice!  Will watch for it's release.

-AniMajik

Got two quick tests here. Click for full sizes.

The first is a new cross-hatching pattern i’ve created. This was done by creating a new brush with the criss cross pattern (with scattering options enabled), and then using the seamless painting option in Photoshop CS5. Each ‘click’ of the brush is on a different layer (four in total), with each one having a different amount of opacity (100, 75, 50, 25).

This creates an effect of there being less and less criss cross patterns as it gets lighter, and more overlaid criss cross patterns as it gets darker. It was very easy to make and works as expected, which proves the possibility of creating more free patterns post-release.

The second was a spontaneous test. I found some free manga brushes by Psychobob, one of which being a pack of “shock” brushes. I figured i’d take one of these, turn it into an opacity map, apply it to a flat plane, and then use it with the screentoned opacity option to get screentoned manga effects.

Considering the opacity map is incredibly small (223 x 220, the original brushes were incredibly small considering they’re supposed to be used in a comic), it came out incredibly well. Thankfully the screentone effect helps to mask any blurryness that might come from using low res textures. The character featured is Norota from DL-Market (about £9).