Been messing around with toon styles, and all my renders come out very dark- the skin looks dark brown/gray no matter what lighting i use, even for very pale characters. is there a trick to making toon renders look like they do in all the promo stuff lol?

Which promo do you mean? What version of Poser are you using? Are you using anything else besides Poser?

For cartoon anime style renders I only use one light set to Diffuse IBL Intensity between 50 and 100 percent and it is very bright. I do add a second spot light for shadows sometimes but that does not change the brightness.

to see examples:

Witchhunter.us

Just using poser. comes out identical in Pro 2014, and Pro 11

I saw your work, David. That's some really nice Anime characters.

Darkworld, I still experiment with my renders as I look for the perfect lights. I still use a lot of postwork. I think you want it to render and go! I heard that Poser 11 had a powerful toon render style. It's almost disheartening to hear there are problems with it. Anyway, I might as well say thank you for your products. I've purchased a lot of them. They are pretty amazing.

If you haven't, try LLanime.py or LLtoon by bagginsbill. Don't have links handy but easy to find. In fact, LLanime automates LLtoon and available from the same site. Hope it helps.

Very nice work. David. Here is a couple examples of what PP11 can do ...

Firefly! Awesome show .... and render :-)

Firefly? Shouldn't this be new superfly renderer with geometic edge lines that makes amazing ink lines?

I am a scifi fan but I like the noir feel of the black and white above.

I'm off to research LLtoon.

LLToon

.mt5/.py scripts toon shader resources

Ha ha I get the Irony. The TV show that the render is imitating is Firefly by Joss Whedon. It is actually a preview render as you can see the aux cam in the viewport. The new geometric lines are for preview rendering.

I did not like LL toon that much myself. I prefer to use an edge blend shader to create lines they are more organic looking to me. They are not all the same size. The default poser library has some good shaders one tone and two tone with edge line that I usually start with for characters. They create a good outline. I thought I might use the geometric line more but I prefer the edge bled line.

One thing the geometric line will work good for is to outline details like pockets and buttonss on shirt etc. I found used on a low setting like .2 or less combined with edge blend can look really good. But this is for a very 2d anime look as is most of what I am currently working on.

Yeah, I like a pen.

EldritchCellar (EC) is right (as usual). The pen seems stills to be the best way to get things done for inking and coloring. The geometric lines is for preview rendering only. Still it's improved quite a bit over the toon mode. I can see some people might be willing to use this for their comic as things are done in real time. Speed is not something to be overlooked when you have to crank out scene after scene to compose a page. I know person uses one scene per page for their comic and he's going to get a dramatic speed boost over someone like me that composes one scene per panel.

I remember jwtoons and having something that can assign cel shading values to an entire scene with darkening the entire scene too much is very valuable. Thanks for the links, EC.

Have to admit that I've always liked Poser's preview renderer and the sketch renderer too. Poser's preview styles are very well done IMO. I've played around quite a bit with C4d's Sketch and Toon which is a high end feature and honestly, with a little know-how Poser's various non realist render options can yield comparable results. Nice to see that the preview renderer is still getting some attention from SM. Would be nice to see Sketch Renderer get a little overhaul sometime in the future. There's soooo many cool options tucked away in Poser once you dig around in there a little.

Well, Poser 11 has more control over the preview render ... AND edge geometry lines now ... that can be customized in thickness in the mat room. I'm finding it amazing! The whole firefly renderer vs. "firefly" tv show can be confusing for those who never watched the short lived series.

I never did get into Firefly. Great render though. I'm still waiting on my physical copy of Poser and can't wait to load some of my previous toon render pz3's to check the difference.

I've found when using Poser10 Comic book style render, that when a texture appears too dark, I can improve it by using low values of the intended colour or connecting the texture map in the ambient channel, this keeps the level of toon shading but forces through a bit more of the base colour. I've also found that I had to "unlearn" all the rendering rules for "realistic/raytrace" work. Since most texture shaders, especiallly character mats are optimised for raytrace it is necessary sometimes to simplify them for toons. I noticed in Boni's second image, the female to the right of the central figure is a case where I'd connect the main texture to ambient as well with 0.05 or 0.1 value, the male 3rd from left has weirdly shiney hair, my guess is that the specular node has elements that the toon renderer is misreading. I've also found that Poser's ancient "Basic Lights" set has become very useful again.

Boni I like that render a lot (the coloured one with all the people) but I think it would look better with shadows, and also there is an area that toons around the nose that doesn't look quite so good. I was thinking when I start tooning again, I might actually make two renders, normal and tooned and overlay them in photoshop and fade some of the face tooning a bit. Not quite sure yet, still in the planning phase. Love esther

I have not decided yet whether to do poser tooning directly as you have demonstrated which would be quick and easy, or use my old method with shaderworks for rdna combined with olivier's art materials which is fairly quick too, or a combination of both. the semidieu method (shaderworks) looks amazing in poser 11. the skin almost glows. Love esther

@esther Have you gone back to Poser or are sticking with Vue? Are you still updating Avenging Angel?

The above render is a poser latest version render. I use vue for some background scenery mostly and it's not quite compatible with latest poser yet. haven't done much comic for awhile because of a whole lot of reallife stuff and work which may take me another 6 monthes although I'm hoping to knock out another episode before then, and I have been thinking how to do the background scenes as I need a younger teen character for the backflash or switchback parts. I was wondering if pauline would fit the bill but I'm not so sure. Like everyone else I'm waiting for projectE. Love esther

@ester I really like your render. Sep the tones on the skin and the edge blend.

I just finished an intro for the show I am creating. It was done all in Poser: half was done in Poser Pro 2014 and Half in the new Poser 11 although I do not think I used any features exclusive to the new version. The only post work besides special effects was a color correction and a diffusion glow.

Witch Hunter Intro

Your intro looks great! How did you do your tooning? Love esther PS I really love the music. What is it?

I'm guessing the words in the music "I don't see what you see" refer to that she can see those weird things eg the dragon thingy and normal people can't?

First the music: I really like her Mish O'Neill. I purchased a license to use her music on stockmusicsite.com. Just like we can use content from Renderosity in renders that site is the same for music. The sound to me is like alt rock girl pop punk from the late 90's early 2000's Which is the style I wanted. The whole premise of the show started with what would Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Charmed the tv shows look like if they were an anime. This music fit in perfectly. Also because the lead character is a girl it happened to be fortuitous that the lyrics fit in nicely.

For the toon style all the backgrounds are pretty much left stock as they came. For the characters I change all the skin. I start with a preset from the Poser content runtime under "materials/Poser (version) Content/Cartoon/toon/GF-Skin1" and I darken out the diffuse color node. here is a pic

For the clothing i do the same with a preset from the same library and adjust the color if it is plain. If it is a pattern or texture I just add an edge blend to the node. here is a pic:

I delete all the lights and use add one ibl light and that helps flatten the look. if there is a shadow i create that by adding one more light a spotlight and position it above the character to get a shadow. I then turn the preview shadow size to max (4096) It does not affect the flatness just gives shadow. I usually render with preview render. My normal settings are to untick remove backfiring polys and set preview resolution to 2048 (sometimes 4096 but it usually does not make a difference).

Not in this intro but in some scenes the background did not render correctly in which case I render in Firefly with auto setting set to final and no other changes.

note: (sometimes the edge blend on a characters clothes will not show up in a firefly render but only in a preview render. I was told It is because some clothes Items are made flat with no depth. I just then render the character in preview with the background off and composite over the firefly rendered background. Aside from that my characters look exactly the same rendered in preview or firefly but preview render is faster)

One last comment I think the look is really sold because I use toon style hair. I have never been able to get strand hair to look good in a cartoon setting. Also I mostly use anime style eyes and faces on the characters. The four main characters used here are Near Me, Hiro 3, Star!, and Maybe (by Akatora)

Funny you should mention charmed as the music reminded me of that. It fits perfectly! Great find! I think you should try shaderworks at rdna with olivier's art materials and toon software as that is really versatile. You can get a lot of different looks and you can change clothes, hair, skin, props etc all in one hit, or just change some things and there are lots of adjustments you can do really quickly. Any time we can save is important when makign a comic, as it takes so long to dress a character, set up a scene, put props in the hand, render etc. Anyway best of luck. you're doing a great job. Love esther

I don't think oliver's art materials are available anymore. At least I have not been able to find them. I do have so pass art shaders I am starting to mess around with. I will probably buy some of the shader works scripts. I think because I am new to Poser only using it this year I really wanted o get comfortable with all the core features before customizing it with scripts so I know what they are doing.

there are two scripts that I find invaluable (apart from shaderworks toon). that is advanced library manager and advanced figure manager. I have 1000s of external runtimes in poser and I can load them all into poser instantly with the script, and also instead of applying a whole pose, I can apply say, just an arm, or a hand or a foot etc. I can instantly search and find all my runtimes with the word car in the title of the folder that encloses the runtime folder and then advanced lbirary manager and merge them all together. with advanced figure manager I can say, make a whole lot of body parts invisible all in one hit, if there is pokethrough of clothes, or I can parent a whole lot of things to a grouping object and then move them all at once by moving the grouping object etc. I can't function without these scripts. Love esther PS what happened to olivier's art materials? That worked so well with the shaderworks script. It can't really be gone can it??

It looks like some of those scripts are on sale I will be trying them out. Thanks.

Those ones definitely make my workflow better! I had a look for Olivier's art materials on rdna and I couldn't find them either . weird.

Yup! I just got a reply back from the RDNA Forum. Bascially I'm outta luck. No longer for public sale. I wonder if this means they are for private sale if I can find the original seller?

I think Olivier Vinet has disappeared. The last thing was from around 2011 when he was talking about a big music project

I also have a toon render question.Poser Pro Game Dev 10.0.5.30556 How can I render a toon render without getting all these extra lines (see image)

I found out thru searching: You have to make sure all the parts in the material room have the same toon id number.