Thanks everyone for that information. @false1 - I like the look of the MonoPrice tablet. I like to price even better. hehe. I think I'll get one and play around with it. @boni - Yes, I have Poser Pro. I've also discovered lots of custom sketch render settings to experiment with. @rokket - That GIMP outlining looks pretty good. I'll definitely give that a try. @ghonma - I've been using 150% to work with, but if these drawings are going to end up in a graphic novel format, as panels on a page, then I may want to reduce them even smaller, and use 200% or more for the originals. But then I have to make my lines bolder so they will show up right in a smaller panel.

rokket posted at 12:36AM Thu, 24 September 2015 - #4230442

GIMP is a free program that has a lot of photoshop style features and isn't that hard to learn. It's got a pretty decent toon oultiner. Just giving you another alternative.

Cool. My laptop is Linux and I have Gimp on it. I've just never tried it.

willshetterly posted at 10:09PM Wed, 23 September 2015 - #4230396

I like it, but if you're after a comic book feel, you might see if you can find something that provides more of a black outline. There are some Photoshop actions for sale here by AdamWright and Darkworld and maybe others that you might like, if you haven't seen them already.

Good advice. I would like a bolder outline, but I don't have Photoshop. I use Paintshop Pro. (I've used it since version 0 in 1990, and I'm used to it.)

I have been seriously considering getting a drawing tablet and doing my outlining by hand, or, (since I'm a retired programmer) writing my own Paintshop plugin to do outlining. (But that's another whole can or worms!)

Another alternative is a Poser shader for outlining. Then I could use a render from that as an overlay on a layer in Paintshop.

Thanks everyone for all the help and suggestions. I got transparency maps figured out (I use PaintshopPro) to create them. I'm working now on getting the "filthy rag" look. Also, I realized that by removing the belt loops and pockets from the pants texture (using a copy of the original texture, of course) I can make them look more like 19th century pants.

I also discovered that the transparent parts of the clothing still cast shadows in preview mode, so I had to turn of shadows for each part so that I could see to arrange my lighting properly.

I was looking at the advanced materials page with all the nodes and connections, and I couldn't make any sense out of it. Then, after a couple of hours of fiddling with it, and reading the manual, the light bulb suddenly lit up and it all made sense to me! funny how that works.

I'm still going to try other hair, and I haven't tried a beard yet. Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll go check them out.

@quietrob: I don't know yet what I'll do with my project. I figure out somewhere to post it. Probably on my old website, which hasn't been updated in 10 years and probably hasn't had a single visitor in that time either. hehe

rokket posted at 1:23AM Wed, 23 September 2015 - #4230203

Transparency maps would work better for the clothes. There are tutorials out there on how to create them (I think there is even one on this site). Then the clothing wouldn't look like it's melting into his body.

Thanks. I figured out how to do transparency maps and you're right, they do look a lot better. I still need to to an alternate texture to make the clothing look dirty and stained. Learning new software is a slow process, but each render gets just a little bit better than the last one. That's encouraging.

I just got an earful from a mother who's 5 or 6 year old boy was gawking over my shoulder in a food court and saw this. I think the advertisements on here should probably tone it down. As far as the gallery, stay within the TOS and post away. I have never said I am sorry so many times in 45 seconds in my life, and it wasn't pleasant and wasn't even my fault really. But I can see the point.

I find it annoying that that was my post the ad appeared over. But I guess there's nothing we can do about that. I came here to share my art and learn from the experts. I guess there's a price I have to pay for that. But I sure would enjoy seeing art that didn't center on half-dressed women, huge weapons, and death and destruction.

What about the idea of a juried gallery, a safe haven for art that isn't teenage boy bait.

Thanks for your suggestions. I solved the clothing problem for now by tweeking the clothing pose dials so that it didn't fit right. Cheating, but it worked! I also found some hair, but I had to position it manually, which is OK because I'm not going to animate it, so it doesn't have to conform. I haven't found a beard yet, but I'm still looking. This is what I have so far:

Thanks for the info. Being such a newbie at Poser (almost a whole week now!) I hadn't even thought about modifying textures, let alone altering models. I did download Blender yesterday, but I haven't been brave enough to even run it yet. hehe.

I'm starting to zero in on my toon style. Here's my latest experiment. I'm relatively happy with it. Instead of rendering the pose, I just took a screenshot of the preview window with the settings:

• Display > Cartoon Tones > Three Tones
• Display > Cartoon Tones > Comic Book (color)

Then I crop it with Paintshop Pro and feed it to a free image manipulation program called FotoSketcher that is supposed to make photos look like paintings or drawings. The results of FotoSketcher are a mixture good and bad, but if you play with the settings you can get some interesting results.

I last used Poser in 2002. Just last week I installed Poser Pro 2014 and started playing around with it again. Then I found an old hard drive in a box in the back of the closet from the computer I had back then. On that hard drive I found the install files for Victoria 2 (and essentials) and Michael 2 (and essentials). So I installed them, and guess what? They work fine in Poser Pro 2014. So for me, V4 would be an upgrade. But since I'm mostly interested in toon rendering (graphic novel style) V2 is just as good as V4 for my purposes, and probably as good as anything newer.

So I guess it really depends on what your artistic goals are.

Back in 2002, the last time I was playing with Poser 3, we had "newsgroups" for poser art and 3d art in general. No moderators, post whatever you want. You quickly learned which posters to ignore and which ones to read. The art was varied and creative, with a fair share of nudity and softcore, but an awful lot of really good art too. When you posted something it lasted for a couple days, and then was gone, buried under the flood of new art coming in all the time. It was wide open and unsupervised, but it worked. I miss the newsgroups.

But even then the newsgroups were dominated by teenage boys who got Poser for the sole purpose of gawking at naked females and creating scenes of mayhem and destruction featuring giant weapons, battle-bots, and (of course) half naked women carrying giant weapons. In that respect, nothing has changed much in the 13 years since I last played with Poser.

I came back to Poser because now that I'm retired I thought I'd like to do a graphic novel just for fun. But what I have in mind involves 19th century period costumes, no nudity, no giant weapons, no mayhem and destruction. Just good story-telling (I hope). I guess I'm obsolete. But that's OK. I'll still enjoy doing what I enjoy doing. I'll find some place to post my art.

infinity10 posted at 10:57PM Sun, 20 September 2015 - #4229700

Cool.

You may also use the material room if you have a non-Debut version of Poser. Use the light node, Diffuse, Toon sub node. Plug into Alternate diffuse. And render with toon line selected. But the latter gives a lot of random black speckles inthe final image, which is annoying. Cheers.

I haven't figured out the materials stuff yet. I have Poser Pro 2014. So far, though the toon renders I've gotten from Poser are not the style I'm looking for for my first hobby project. I might end up going full black and white for my first project anyway. Haven't decided yet.

Once upon a time, a long time ago (2002) I had Poser 3 and played with it for a while. I made this comic:

Geek Toons

Yes, I know it's terrible. But family obligations took up too much time and I set it aside. Now, 13 years later, I'm retired. So I just got Poser Pro 2014 and I'm starting to dig into it again. This time around I hope I can learn how to do better toons. I'm taking my inspiration from all the great toons I've seen in this thread.

My ambition is to some day create a graphic novel, but first I have to learn Poser all over again. (I also downloaded DAZ Studio and Blender too. I'll be busy, that's for sure.)

Don't despair, whatever you do. :) I've had DAZ for a week and Poser for 4 days now and I'm starting to feel like someday I may actually be able to do some creative work with them. So far it's been nothing but fighting the software (or rather my ignorance of it) but today I actually started understanding what is going on, and started getting some decent renders with imported content from several different sources.

And for what it's worth, I discovered you can create a folder named "runtime" anywhere you want, even on an external USB drive (as long as it's plugged in when you run Poser) and then link that folder into your library by clicking on the little folder icon with the plus sign (the tool tip says "Add Library"). So you don't need to put content any place special, you just have to tell Poser where you put it. I keep mine in a folder in "My Documents" called "PoserContent\Runtime". To tell Poser where it is, I add "PoserContent" as the folder, not "runtime". You need to add to library the folder that contains "runtime".

hborre posted at 6:23PM Sat, 19 September 2015 - #4229510

I'm assuming you are referring to a flat plane for use as a background curtain. If that is the case, find the height x width of your image in pixels, then scale the X & Y of your plane accordingly. Load the image and afterwards use the general scale for the prop to the desired background size.

Personally, I hate linking from another source. If the connection changes, the image is lost from the archive. Uploading is permanent; you can go back several years and still find the desired information.

Edit: taking a second look at that right image, the normals appear very wacky. Don't use the double sided prop.

OK. I tried the one-sided square and that worked, even when scaled. The problem with scaling the whole thing and not scaling UV is that this makes the bricks way too big in relation to the figure. I need the bitmap to be tiled onto the plane several times. That does seem to work properly using the one-sided square.

I also applied the same texture to the solid box and that rendered correctly as well. It only appears to be the flat 2-sided square that fails to render properly. In fact I added many different props to the scene and applied the same texture to all of them, and they all rendered properly except for the 2-sided square. I even have a giant perfectly textured brick teapot that looks just fine when rendered.

So apparently a two-sided square doesn't play well with texture maps.