Hey all,

I finally got some time to work on some cel-shading this weekend, and I have a script to share with you.  I love Bagginsbill's LLToon material, since it provides the level of control that I need for cel-shading.  I made a version of that with defaults set to replicate the style of shading used in anime and called it LLAnime, which I have shared before, but there was still a problem.  It just took too long to apply the material to all of the objects in my scene, to get a totally cel-shaded scene.  So, I wrote a script that will cel-shade everything in the scene with LLAnime.  It also preserves the original Diffuse and Specular channels by making them values/inputs to LLAnime.  My post on 3DAnimeStudio describes in a little more detail:

http://3danimestudio.com/script-to-easily-cel-shade-everything-in-poser-scene/

Please read my caveats in that post, though, since the script is still kind of raw and unfinished.  You will need to download LLAnime and install it in the right place.  After writing all of this, I see that I need to create a zip, but I don't have time now.

You can download the script from that page.  I would love to hear if anyone tries it out, and I would love to see your pictures.  

OK, have fun guys, and thanks again to Bagginsbill for LLToon!

Oh, sorry, I failed to make the address a link.  Here you go:

http://3danimestudio.com/script-to-easily-cel-shade-everything-in-poser-scene/

sounds interesting.  Does it do toon lines at all as well as cel shading?

Love Esther

PS post some pics

I may not understand ... but doesn't PP2014 already do this ... with lines?  I've been doing comic style images for a while now and enjoying it.  No disrespect but what is the difference.  I don't understand.  Here is a sample of the latest piece I did, just this morning.  These are all untouched Poser renders.

and a couple more ...

Not everyone has Poser Pro 2014 ;)

Thanks for this. I'll check it out.

True, for these this script will be very nice ...even easier than the individual shaders previously available by Olivier over at RDNA.

Hey estherau!  Long time no see!  It does outlines by angle of incidence, if you know what I mean.  Its not the post-render outline filter.  That's just the way that LLToon works.  I'll post some renders when I get some more time.

Hey Boni, thanks for your response!  dlfurman is right that a lot of people don't have PP2014, including myself, so I don't know about its special features.  Will it toon shade the entire scene without you having to run a Wacro on each figure/prop?  That's exactly what I was trying to achieve, because you can't do that with Poser 10 or Poser Pro 2010.  In the versions of Poser I have, all you get is a Wacro that can be applied to only one figure at a time.

The other thing that is not obvious from my post is that I consider LLToon/LLAnime to be a better cel-shader than the built in Toon Shader Node that comes with Poser.  Bagginsbill created LLToon and could probably give you several reasons why its an improvement over the native Toon Shader Node, however, the main reason I care is that it allows you to adjust the "Toon Midpoint."  This is the point at which it switches from the light tone to the dark tone (in a two tone scenario).  The default Toon Shader Node does not allow you to adjust this, so if your character is in a dark scene, you get a flat, single shade to your character.  LLToon/LLAnime allows you to change that midpoint for darker scenes so that you can still achieve two tone shading.  That may sound like a super technical detail, but I think it matters a lot.  I was really stoked when Bagginsbill posted his shader here in the forums, and I recommend it to anyone that is into cel-shading.

Thanks for posting those renders.  They look great, but it is a very comic book style, which is not really what I'm into right now.  Can PP2014 also do a more anime look?

dlfurman, you're welcome!  Remember my caveats, though.  I already identified another problem that I need to fix.  Apparently, I'm blowing away transparency.  Easy fix, but its not done yet.

it looks good, digi.  please post one with good line-work, if possible.  poser ink outlines not useful:

they expand everything, e.g. making hands look like they got mittens on 'em, and many other issues

IMVHO.

For previous versions of Poser this is a wonderful script. As for how the toon shader works in PP2014 ... Right-click  inside the pose window. The list includes toon at the bottom. The fly out list offers tone choices  and  comic book and conic book color  there are a couple other places to adjust, but that's the primary place ... Then render in preview mode.  For me the key is in the lighting. And adjustments in the preview  settings window. Yes, it renders the whole scene at once ,,, in a very short time.

I think the poser internal script does fixed line widths and not angle of incidence lines.  also I have a feeling it doesn't handle transparency, but I could be wrong there as I haven't messed with it for years.

The cartoon shader in the render above does look good and it is very quick and easy. however to me the renders always look dark.

I mainly used olivier's tooning with shader works to apply the toon effect in one click.

But I will look at this one too.

Love esther

Hey Digitani,

Yes, it has been awhile!

I will try and have a look at this this weekend.  sounds very interesting.

Love esther

Following is a series of screen shots and renders to show my process with the toon feature in PP2014.  The model isn't the best example and I didn't take time to tweak it completely, but you get the idea:

Where to find the toon settings

Basic comic-color

Adjusting the contrast ... (see the dial at the bottom).

Adjusting preview setting

Black and white render sample.

Black and white portrait ... adjusted lighting.

Color portrait, again lighting adjusted for side shadow.  This frankly is one of the main reasons I bought PP2014. 

Happy Rendering!

Perhaps a link to original BB thread? Appreciated.

Thanks all, but I have been using it some and realize that there are some pretty bad problems with it.  I may have jumped the gun a little on posting about it.  If there is a human figure in the scene, it does not deal with that well.  I'll post again after I get that fixed.

We do look forward to your tweaks.  Also ... consider making a "plug-in" for EZmat (see sticky) ... people would really go for that!  It was mentioned that Anime and Manga was a focus, so just to let you see, comic-book settings can work as a base for manga as well.  here simple samples.  black and white and color.

As you can see, there's a little tweaking ... but nothing that can't be fixed in photoshop or other graphics program.  Again, this is for those who want to experiment with comic-book settings in PP2014.  Have fun all, and look forward to the new script!

digitani, I can't find the download link for the mt5 file that your script says I need.

http://3danimestudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/LLAnime.mt5

ok - i'll try again soon. In the meantime here's a render with olivier's toon shaders using shadowers for easy application.

and then I generally put it into photoshop, duplicate the layer and apply a bit of a toon shader as well.

and...

also I normally do a little postmark myself on the clothes.  but I  haven't done this today.

Hi Digitani,

Maybe this is a mac problem or because I didn't put the python script into my python folder but I got this errorL-

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/Volumes/Promise Pegasus/new python tooning script by digitani/DigitaneAnime.py", line 174, in

    toonShade(mat, spec)

  File "/Volumes/Promise Pegasus/new python tooning script by digitani/DigitaneAnime.py", line 115, in toonShade

    pmcColorColor = pmcColor.InputByInternalName("Color")

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'InputByInternalName'

In this one I untooned her so you can see the difference.  my tooning effect is fairly subtle at render.

Love esther

but I left the hair tooned.

" ... consider making a "plug-in" for EZmat (see sticky) ... people would really go for that!  ... "

This is exactly the sort of thing EZMat was designed to be used for, and would be quite easy to do.

It's tempting to make it into a plugin myself - it would only take 10-15 minutes - but what I'd really like to see is the community starting to make their own plugins. Why not give it a go? And if you find you need some help then just ask :-)

Then you'll end up with a really cool shader that is easy to configure and apply and will work on all platforms :-)

Well if you made it then I'm sure some people would dissect it and learn from it so in some cases you would achieve your goal of people learning and doing things themselves.

Wow, you have all made this a great thread, but there is so much that I want to respond to that I can't respond to everything right now.

Boni, thanks so much for posting pictures of your process!  That was really helpful, and I learned something.  Also, thanks for mentioning EZMat!  I was not aware of it, but it looks great.  I'm going to look into that.  It might be better to make a plugin for that instead, especially with the difficulties I'm facing with my script right now.

estherau, thanks for posting those renders, and thank you so much for trying the script.  Sorry it totally failed. :-)

Also, Boni, now that I see what you are doing, I looked in Poser 10 and it does have the Comic Book feature.  That is way cool, but when I try it, it only affects lines and shadow, meaning it adds in a bunch of lines (like a comic) and makes a hard shadow, but it does not change the way the rest of the figure's shading looks.  The rest of the shading is still the normal smooth shaded preview shading.  In your anime and manga example, it looks like you do have toon shading rather than what I am getting.  did you do something more for that than just select the Comic Book feature and adjust the Comic Book Threshold for that anime example?

BTW, here is an image that partially uses LLAnime, but I did by hand before I wrote the script, so its not an example of the script working.

Hey estherau,

Sorry that I have not gotten back to you on this error before now.  I had a little time today to look at this again and it looks like the error you are getting is probably because my script is not finding the LLAnime.mt5 file.  It needs to be in the 'Runtime:libraries:Materials:LLToon' directory.  If you have a chance, could you check if you have the mt5 file in that directory?

Thanks!

FYI:  I just updated this script to fix a major bug and packaged it together with the material so that the material will be installed in the right place.

http://3danimestudio.com/update-to-llanimeall-script-to-cel-shade-everything/