I ordered my on Feb 16th and I'm still waiting for it to be shipped...

Wish I could help with Poser 4 but I never got anything close to a toon look out of it. Sorry.

Attached Link: http://www.comicbookpage.com/Art/Tutorials/CelShading/CelShadingInPoser5.html

Attached Link: http://www.comicbookpage.com/Art/Tutorials/CelShading/CelShadingInPoser5_Step1.html

That's cool. I also hate it when terminology is unclear. It kind of defeats the point of communicating when the communication is unclear. As far as the video game angle is concerned, something like the game 13 is probably closest to what I was going for (since they were aiming for a comic book feel to that game). I have no problems with the normal 3D rendering that Poser does but in my experience, comic books that use 3D computer art simply don't sell. (Of course I strong case could be made that most comic books, regardless of the art style, simply don't sell.) I've been trying to get something out of Poser that would look more like a traditional comic book drawing and I think I got reasonably close. That having been said, there are some clear difference between what this technique can produce and standard comic book art. The main thing is that with standard comic book art, the black lines define just about everything and the color can be removed from the image and the drawing still makes sense. (This is of course because the drawing starts out as a black and white drawing and the color gets added later if at all.) With this technique, if you remove the color (by using solid white texture maps), the result has a lot more graytones than a standard piece of comic book art. That isn't a problem but just something that makes it a little different than typical comic book art.

I was going for something that I thought would look right on the pages of a comic book. My understanding was that this was typically called "cel shading". I though the term referred to animation cels but I could be mistaken. If you want thicker lines, you can increase the attenuation setting on the Edge_Blend node. Anyway, take from it what you will and enjoy.

I'm looking forward to seeing what other people are able to do with this technique. Please let me know about any renders you do using it.

FYI, I haven't had a chance to do the animations that I wanted to do illustrating the various node parameters. If I get a chance to do those, I'll update the tutorial. Basically, I didn't want to keep people waiting for the tutorial because of those.

Attached Link: http://www.comicbookpage.com/Art/Tutorials/CelShading/CelShadingInPoser5.html

Glad you are looking forward to it in a huge way. It is turning out huge so you should be happy.

I'm still working on the tutorial. I've got most of it written. Now it is just a matter of walking through the steps and getting the screen shots and renders and making sure that it works like I expect it to. (I've already had to make a few corrections to it.) There are going to be tons of images for this tutorial. So I don't think anyone will have problems following along. Given how long it has taken so far, I estimate that it might take another week or two to complete the tutorial. Part of that is because I want to include some animations to illustrate how some of the nodes work. The render time alone will make that a slow process. Anyway, I just want to let people know that I'm still plugging away at it.

By the way, the tutorial is coming along nicely but it is taking a lot longer than I expected. Part of the reason for that is that I'm going in to such detail. Another reason is that I'm going through the steps one at a time to make sure that everything works right. In the process of doing that, I'm taking numerous screen shots. So, when the tutorial is finally done, it should be very complete and easy to follow. Joe, I was the guy in back taking notes during your presentations.

I was going for a cel shaded render. I wasn't trying to get any sort of good likeness of Superman. Think of it as just some guy in a Superman suit.

Back when I was in college, I was talking with some of the other students as we waited for one of our classes to start. I forget what we were discussing but at one point I stated that something was "obvious". The professor (we were sitting near the front of the room and he had been within earshot the entire time) countered with sometihng along the lines of "everything is obvious once it has been pointed out". And, of course, he was absolutely correct. In terms of pictures, the tutorial will be filled with them. Everything from full screen shots to which button to push when. I have enough space and bandwidth on my site to have more pictures than most people will need (or probably want). I figure if I'm going to spend the time writing this tutorial, I might as well go all out. I'm starting from an empty scene and building everything up from there. Provided they had some basic computer literacy and an conceptual understanding of 3D graphics (like what a model is and what a texture map is), someone should be able to take Poser 5 out of the box install it and follow along with the tutorial and have just about everything make sense. I'm trying to write this tutorial such that is you have the same models (Michael 3.0 Base, Michael 3.0 Ultra BodySuit, Michael 3.0 Universal Texture Maps (High Res), Dave71's Versa Cloak for Mike, Vicki2 & Vicki3, Project Z M3 and the Genesis Rage Outfit) you can product the extact same images that I did. I'm also putting links to those items in the tutorial. If I remember, I'll put in a link to Joe's Poser 5 training video. There are a few handy techniques I've picked up from Joe both at DragonCon and from the tape and I'd like to give credit were credit is due. Joe's video is well worth picking up.

I've started working on a tutorial. It will walk through the entire process of putting together the images posted above. (I dislike tutorials that seems to think you understand everything except what the tutorial focuses on.) As such, the tutorial will include the blend nodes and all of the other things used. I'm not going to claim it is going to be a very well written tutorial but it should be useful to both novice Poser users and possibly even the advanced ones. At this point, about the only thing I'm certain of if that the tutorial won't be short. I figure people can ignore whatever parts of it they want to. If there is anything else people want included in the tutorial, please let me know. Once I finish the tutorial, I'll post it on my website and put a link to it here.