Last week I "moved" 10 years of downloads to a flash drive ... or so I thought. I went to retrieve the manual for Olivier's Toon shader for a commission I am working on ... and ALL the "moved" folders were empty. Lost, gone ... forever. Well after I stopped reeling from that loss I figured I'd work it out myself to no avail. So ... if you all could help me with this somehow it would be great. Thanks in advance for helping me with this.

Hi Boni, This is a terrifying experience! Gesh...so sorry this has happened to you. I did a Google search and found this article that has some info that may help:

https://www.easeus.com/file-recovery/this-folder-is-empty.html

I hope you find you stuff!

If it helps, the zip was Art Materials Vol1

Bill

What a nightmare. FWIW, I would never move anything I want to keep to a flash drive. Even the best brands seem prone to failure. They're great to copy files from one computer to another, but I don't trust them for long term storage.

I have no idea if Olivier Vinet is still around. His email address in the ReadMe is a Hotmail address.

If you only need the manual, I could email it to you. I assume that would be okay, since it's no good unless you've bought the product.

Also...for me, the zip name is OL-001.zip.

So the downloaded zips are gone, but the runtime installs are still good? And there's nothing in the Documentation runtime folder?

The Wayback Machine has the original store page, but there was no PDF tutorial posted there. I only had his Vol.2 Dry Shaders.

For what it's worth I found the ShaderWorks manual for loading both Oliver's Dry Shaders and Cartoon materials. ShaderWorks was Basil Gass's standalone exe for working with MATs, circa 2006. Here are the pages. It may provide some clues.

You guys are wonderful! I will try some of these things ... but first you are right, I have the runtime installed. I just have to find the manual. I just use to go to the original download cuz it was easier to find manuals and such that way and my P6 download runtime is ... SO big. Wish me luck. And I will try some of your other ideas as well for general knowledge. Thank you!

Just to let you know ... with your help I did find it hidden in the runtime. Cheers!!

Believe it or not, Photoshop's Photocopy filter can produce some very good line art images. They're monochrome but if you process the image beforehand to get flat colours - or render that way, it's a really simple method of adding outlines to your image.

The free G'mic filter suite is now available for Photoshop, and able to produce far better line-art than Photoshop's basic built-in filters, even on tough standard renders (dark, grunge, overlapping shapes). This is especially useful for Daz renders, or for those who do not have Poser 11 and its easy realtime Comic Book feature.

HartyBart! Hea, I like this plug-in, thanks for suggesting it!! Playing around with it now.