Morkonan, they do have a lifetime. I just wanted them to live long enough to go out of frame.

Thanks for the input!

Oh, wow! I did not realize that there was a log. I see it now, but I don't see my long render. I wonder if it logs each frame separately.

I took that same demo and applied a material to the particles. The material has a star shaped transparency mask, and the ambient color is cranked up to 20. Since the particles are set to be light emitters and I rendered with indirect light, you can see them illuminate the ground as they fall. I also removed all of the lights from the scene, so that we could enjoy the glow effect.

This took hours to render in HD, but not overnight. I did not check, but it may have been two hours.

https://youtu.be/wvzsRyk7VqU

Thanks for the encouragement, everybody!

arrow1, theoretically, it should work for anything you would normally use a particle system for. Water is best accomplished with fluid simulations, which are different, but you can fake certain things with particles like fountains and waterfalls. I've heard that fluid simulations work better for smoke too, but I think it is very common to use particle systems for smoke. You can apply any material to the particle that you choose to make it look as you wish. In the future, I may choose to allow different geometries for particles too, but for now its just a camera facing triangle that you can apply material to. Note that this includes transparency, so it does not need to look like a triangle, of course.

Here is an old example that I made a couple of years back using my system to produce a rocket engine effect: Rocket Demo for Particle System for Poser

In my case, there are no morphs, so it is safe to just save as a smart prop, but it did not allow me to save it as a prop. When I select the hair, I don't get the add button in my prop library. I can save it as a figure, and it retains the parameter settings, but does not automatically reparent to Hiro. Not the worst, but I don't understand why it won't let me save as a smart prop.

Thank you both so much for your help!

Its about darn time!  Thanks Rendo! :-)

FYI:  I just updated this script to fix a major bug and packaged it together with the material so that the material will be installed in the right place.

http://3danimestudio.com/update-to-llanimeall-script-to-cel-shade-everything/

Hey estherau,

Sorry that I have not gotten back to you on this error before now.  I had a little time today to look at this again and it looks like the error you are getting is probably because my script is not finding the LLAnime.mt5 file.  It needs to be in the 'Runtime:libraries:Materials:LLToon' directory.  If you have a chance, could you check if you have the mt5 file in that directory?

Thanks!

I put a print statement at the beginning of the program to be sure.  It must not be running at all.

Wow, you have all made this a great thread, but there is so much that I want to respond to that I can't respond to everything right now.

Boni, thanks so much for posting pictures of your process!  That was really helpful, and I learned something.  Also, thanks for mentioning EZMat!  I was not aware of it, but it looks great.  I'm going to look into that.  It might be better to make a plugin for that instead, especially with the difficulties I'm facing with my script right now.

estherau, thanks for posting those renders, and thank you so much for trying the script.  Sorry it totally failed. :-)

Also, Boni, now that I see what you are doing, I looked in Poser 10 and it does have the Comic Book feature.  That is way cool, but when I try it, it only affects lines and shadow, meaning it adds in a bunch of lines (like a comic) and makes a hard shadow, but it does not change the way the rest of the figure's shading looks.  The rest of the shading is still the normal smooth shaded preview shading.  In your anime and manga example, it looks like you do have toon shading rather than what I am getting.  did you do something more for that than just select the Comic Book feature and adjust the Comic Book Threshold for that anime example?

BTW, here is an image that partially uses LLAnime, but I did by hand before I wrote the script, so its not an example of the script working.

Thanks all, but I have been using it some and realize that there are some pretty bad problems with it.  I may have jumped the gun a little on posting about it.  If there is a human figure in the scene, it does not deal with that well.  I'll post again after I get that fixed.

Hey estherau!  Long time no see!  It does outlines by angle of incidence, if you know what I mean.  Its not the post-render outline filter.  That's just the way that LLToon works.  I'll post some renders when I get some more time.

Hey Boni, thanks for your response!  dlfurman is right that a lot of people don't have PP2014, including myself, so I don't know about its special features.  Will it toon shade the entire scene without you having to run a Wacro on each figure/prop?  That's exactly what I was trying to achieve, because you can't do that with Poser 10 or Poser Pro 2010.  In the versions of Poser I have, all you get is a Wacro that can be applied to only one figure at a time.

The other thing that is not obvious from my post is that I consider LLToon/LLAnime to be a better cel-shader than the built in Toon Shader Node that comes with Poser.  Bagginsbill created LLToon and could probably give you several reasons why its an improvement over the native Toon Shader Node, however, the main reason I care is that it allows you to adjust the "Toon Midpoint."  This is the point at which it switches from the light tone to the dark tone (in a two tone scenario).  The default Toon Shader Node does not allow you to adjust this, so if your character is in a dark scene, you get a flat, single shade to your character.  LLToon/LLAnime allows you to change that midpoint for darker scenes so that you can still achieve two tone shading.  That may sound like a super technical detail, but I think it matters a lot.  I was really stoked when Bagginsbill posted his shader here in the forums, and I recommend it to anyone that is into cel-shading.

Thanks for posting those renders.  They look great, but it is a very comic book style, which is not really what I'm into right now.  Can PP2014 also do a more anime look?

dlfurman, you're welcome!  Remember my caveats, though.  I already identified another problem that I need to fix.  Apparently, I'm blowing away transparency.  Easy fix, but its not done yet.

Oh, sorry, I failed to make the address a link.  Here you go:

http://3danimestudio.com/script-to-easily-cel-shade-everything-in-poser-scene/

Open the animation panel and notice the keyframes for your animation.  You have some buttons in the upper right part of the keyframes tab in that panel for changing the type of transition that is calculated between keyframes.  Default is spline and there is always a keyframe at frame 1 by default, so if you add a keyframe later on, you get this transition between frame 1 and the new keyframe.  If you want to keep the hand still for this time, you can change the transition between keyframes to constant instead of spline.  What you often have to do is copy the keyframe from the start of the still period to the end of the still period and then set the transition between them to constant.

Thanks so much for your response!  That was a very good analysis, and your examples are great too.  Its a bummer that it is such a manual process to achieve this effect.  There is a glare feature in Carrara that can accomplish this, and I was hoping that it could be that easy in Poser too.

Thanks again!