I'm trying to get better outlines on my toon renders, so here' something I tried this morning.

• Take a screenshot of the Poser pose window in comic book mode.
• Run it through FotoSketcher to get the watercolor look. Set it aside.
• make a copy of the poser file and strip off all texture maps from all objects in the scene, leaving them white.
• In the advanced materials add a node lighting > diffuse > toon and plug it into diffuse color (Do this for ALL objects)
• change both light color and dark color in the toon node to white, and the ink color to black
• adjust line width for best effect for each object. If the object is all black, crank the line width down.
• Spread dial does nothing because light and dark colors are both white, so just leave that alone
• Turn shadows on ALL lights OFF

Again using only the Poser pose window take a screen shot and paste it into you 2D software. Reduce the image colors to black and white only, no shades of grey. Paste this mask as a layer over the first screenshot and select and erase all white, leaving only the black lines. Align the lines with the base image, and make any hand-painted adjustment you like to the mask layer.

Here's the mask screenshot:

and here's the mask overlayed on the base image:

A quicker, easier way to get rid of all the white in GIMP is to go to Colors/Color To Alpha and select white. The white becomes a transparent alpha channel and only the black lines will be visible.

rokket posted at 8:15PM Thu, 24 September 2015 - #4230593

A quicker, easier way to get rid of all the white in GIMP is to go to Colors/Color To Alpha and select white. The white becomes a transparent alpha channel and only the black lines will be visible.

In Paintshop Pro I just use the magic wand selection tool and select any white spot and click "select similar" and hit delete. Anything deleted on a layer becomes transparent.

I'd add some high lights looks a bit flat.

you can use shaders. zbrush has some cool toon shaders I'm sure ya could make shaders in Poser.

matcaps are cool zBrush & Blender has them. Does Poser have matcaps ?

Topaz Labs have some cool 2D effects

App's like Gimp ,Photoshop etc etc have cool effects for them also.

Yeah, GIMP has a similar tool called 'fuzzy select'. I found that using the alpha color works better if there are grey scale colors in the images, or if you haven't reduced to just black and white, as it sometimes takes out more than you wanted it to. Nice work, though. I am seeing improvements.

RorrKonn posted at 9:18PM Thu, 24 September 2015 - #4230603

I'd add some high lights looks a bit flat.

you can use shaders. zbrush has some cool toon shaders I'm sure ya could make shaders in Poser.

matcaps are cool zBrush & Blender has them. Does Poser have matcaps ?

Topaz Labs have some cool 2D effects

App's like Gimp ,Photoshop etc etc have cool effects for them also.

I'm going for the flat, vintage comic book look. Highlights would be out of character for that. But thanks for the comments.

You're on the right track, Fiziwig. I see where you're going and it should work nicely. Keep up the good work!

Refer to my post in your thread on getting my toon groove. There is a lot on outlines there. Cheers.

you can use toon ink method on these after doing edge blend render in poser, however entire process has been adapted to PP2016 as "geom. edge" variable. see nerd's announcement in community forum.

Miss Nancy posted at 9:50AM Fri, 25 September 2015 - #4230705

you can use toon ink method on these, however this process has been adapted to PP2016 as "geom. edge" variable. see nerd's announcement in community forum.

So we can get this same effect without any other software? That's amazing! Anything that cuts down on the workflow while maintaining quality is a big win!

I wanted to be sure this technique would work with other kinds of poses, so I took an earlier pose and ran it through the same identical steps with the same identical settings, and it looks to me like it works just fine for this very different image: