Thanks for the freedback. Today I think her facial features look a little bit too much over the top, especially in close up... depends on my mood hwo I feel about that.

Regarding commercial use, if I am not mistaken most of the Renderosity and Daz licenses are restricted to non-commercial use. And you need and extended license if you want to use them on a commercial project.

I dont know, maybe I should rethink that, but for now I'll keep it that way I think. But then I am not sure if not any figure derived from a Poser base figure is restricted in copyright?

Initially I was planning to sell a character on Renderosity but I think its better to start with a free one while I am still learning. And since I do not expect too much money from such a project it seems to much to care to become a vendor.

And what I would appreciate either way is people making props for her, and so on, or improvements, commercial or for free which ever they prefer.

I guess so, but I assume it's not worth it.

You can set this up once and save it all, then you just have to reload the HDRI 3 times.

But sometimes you want to make adjustments, so automatizing this is not much of an advantge.

For instance you may want to adjust the size and fading of the 2DWave shader mask, or you may want to switch the shadows and diffuse part off (you can do this by just using the same material on the ground as on the background of the GROUND object.)

Generally, you want the mask and "passive diffuse" part which catches the shadow to be as small as possible, to reduce noise in the rendering, but at the same time you want the transition between both materials to be as smooth as possible to reduce any ever so slight color and shading differences that night occur.

another thing worth mentioning that people often seem to miss is that your figure should not be at 0,0 but offset. 0,0 is actually where the image was taken from, so you actually want to place your camera around there.

At least thats what I think, I havnt played around with this too much.

Hi

the result is not too different to other methods it's just easy to use

in the image you can see the horizontal line just above the white ball, since the mask didnt match well, its too large.

a trick to deal with the color shift is to sample the color of the sky and rotate it by 180° (use th opposite color) to tint the diffuse passive part.

Hi adp thanks for the explanation and script, maybe its helfpful for someone I actually quit Poser and uninstalled it it turns out to be too much a waste of time, energy and money, and doesnt get me anywhere I want

Well I did exactly this. Just that a) the expression dials ect stopped working and b) I cant copy the morphed shaped to another figure. no matter what method I use.

I switched to Pauline to test there it worked just fine,

Thanks for your time.

It's probably the smartest solution, and basically what I started with.

However I wanted more control over some details and a more subtle shading.

I would like to have a more consistent but broader outline, and no "outline" shades in the face or more control over them when they occur.

I also would have liked to use GI and/or AO on the shading for more subtle plasticity.

More control over where the borders are between shades.

Less posterizing on the brighter shades of the skin, and some other details.

Of course you can build on your scheme and add any complexity and more toon shaders and achieve that in some parts.

That's what I did first, but some things can't be achieved, like what I would like the outline to be like.

I also ran into some problems while trying to improve on that. So I started to rebuild the toon shader from scratch.

I use fresnel blend or edge blend into math functions "step" for the outline and then mult to add it to other parts, etc.

I use Diffusion -> blender -> step -> inverse -> mult for instance for the dark shadings and Phong in a similar fashion (with inverse mult) for the highlights etc.

But all in all it doesnt look very different or improved compared to your solution.

But I didnt know, you have to try these things to find out, and there is still a lot of things I could try-

For instance I actually can have a broader, more sharp outline than the toon shader, but it tends to fill to large areas when the angle is sharp. So it's not really improved, even though it does what I wanted.

I also tried the comic book look from the Preview, but it didnt get me where I wanted.

All these soultions including yours don't look bad when you spend a little more time finetuning them, but it's not 100% what I want - in the end I want to create new looks that do not look much like what we are used to from 3D or Poser...

this is what I got, 0.07 % closer then yesterday, and that ist what I want to achieve:

https://muchofmucha.tumblr.com/

not even close, and I also know it can not be done in Poser, but the closer I get the more happe Ill be

Thanks folks.

I suspected that but didnt find a relevant info in the manual- stupid that the CyclesSurface has the "Firefly" radio checkbox. So you can switch it on but it doesnt render.

Stiff like that can drive you crazy, when you spend hours to figure it out-

Meanwhile I found that you can use the shaders in PoserSurface, when you feed them into a Blender node first. Then you can send this into a step function etc. So I got my posterize effect, will post images later or tomorrow

It seems a little bit slow to render though, not sure why, its not even raytracing.

what am I doing wrong? why does this most basic connection render black in Firefly, and how are you supposed to do it right? It shows as expected in the preview, and renders in Superfly.

Thanks

starlingblue posted at 8:33AM Mon, 07 September 2020 - #4398831

Actually I think I misunderstood the Fresnel slighly and wasnt aware that it really already does give a light angle dependent shade.

Of course it doesnt, it just gives reflection vs refraction as greyscale.

And no, it seems you can't use it with the PoserSurface, at least not directly on a shading port to see what it returns.

So what modules can you actually use there? Some you can, some you can't, is there a list or explanation somewhere?

Also, I am looking for a Poser Forum where you actually get useful information quickly, any tips?

Thanks, it's appreciated, and I also found your shaders on sharecg.

However it takes a little too much time for me search and go through all this, since in the end I want to do quite different things, so I assume the relevant node I am looking for is the Fresnel Node?

Actually I think I misunderstood the Fresnel slighly and wasnt aware that it really already does give a light angle dependent shade.

But why does the ToonBsdf not render in Firefly when I connect it directly to the CyclesSurface Surface input like mentioned above?

I want to keep the basic toon shaders a simple as possible, cause in the end I want a hybrid look where a lot of other stuff goes into the flat materials and the toon is just for making a "posterize" effect and outline.

So I try to avoid cycles if possible since the structure gets large quickly, and especially since I have this bug where the modules jump around on screen...

I also missed the LightPath module, so, can you also use this with the PoserSurface Node? oder Do you need to use CyclesSurface when you use this?

I am a little bit confused which modules and renderers are compatible and which are not.

here you can see the dynamic hair and what I try to achieve at the monent:

I want this Art Nouveau style look, where the figure has a very soft skin tone but with quite elaborate nearly realsitic shading, and strong dark outlines.

A few minutes with several toon shaders inside the material from the image in the first post got me this, so I thought, great, this will work well, just need to improve it a little bit- Many hours later, it still looks like this and I cant improve it, that is, I cant get better or stronger outlines.

For instance when I choose "Improved outline", the head gets black., When I increase the outline width, I get more grey shadows and cant make the contrast the way I want it.

When I switch render mode, it works with "improved2 line but the line of the dress disappears. And so on.

Sigh.

Same with the hair - first experiment got me basically the same result as above. Then I spent weeks trying to improve it slightly, like make one strand go away that comes out of the head at the wrong place Just, each time I import a new hair without the strand, the simulation breaks.

No idea why.

So, sorry if I come across a little bit frustrated, but I spent to much time with things that dont work for very unclear reasons.

Thanks for the link - maybe Ill get it, but I spent too much on content already. its basically what I did, then, I guess. And this kind of works, but the collision detection is too coarse , since Bullet Physices seems to only use a "convex hull" that comes down to a rounded diamond shape for the head. It should use a finer mesh, than it would work. This would need more computation, but its basically the same as the cloth room simulation. Still possible, and reasonable. Idealy you would need a dummy for the head that has a somehwat lower resolution to save some.

It has advantages over strand hair since you need less vertices, and, in theory, you could use it in games than (as premade animations).

Id post my hair sim, if my basic hair shape was nicer modeled, but as I said I am bad a modeling, just started a few weeks ago, basically. Otherwise its quite nice actually, and you can make new hair styles easily, by letting the figur jump around and using the resulting hairshapes as morph targets...

The shape from the picture in the first pose is dynamic polygon hair.

About the bug with the toon shader: I was wrong, it is still a bug. Only happens in Firefly progressive mode. Unfurtunately, in the other mode there is also a different bug, with the same shader and outline mode. So you have the choice between two render bugs it seems.

It wouldnt be so bad if it wouldnt cost me a whole day to investigate this.

ghostman posted at 3:46PM Sun, 06 September 2020 - #4398786

A character in the poser world is not the base figure. It's usually the morph and the texture for it. So you can sell a Character that is made for a specific Figure mesh.

Yes I understand that. But you can onl sell it for Poser, since it needs the base mesh when you only sell the morph data. You can not use this in game then.

And that is where I find the quoted wording above from the EULA confusing, cause it seems to say you can. Doesnt it? under the last point g).

I think now I understand why this mode rendered black:

the shader, ist seems, doesnt use the geometrie for the edge, but the surface angle/normal. So its basically similar to a (smooth) step function on a normal shader with some fresnel or egde blend.

WHen you have bump, the pixel that in the "edge" angle are tinted with the outline color.

This is different to the comic book look that you can have in the editor.

Not sure if this is true, but thats my theorie about it - so it isnt really an error of the program, it just does slightly different things than you'd expect.

So you could make your own toon shader easily, that wokrs the same way I guess.