Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Z-Tooning In To Vue From Poser To Get An "Illustration Look"

Veritas777 opened this issue on Jul 23, 2003 ยท 10 posts


Veritas777 posted Wed, 23 July 2003 at 8:06 PM

Hi, I don't know if anyone has tried the Z-Toon technique yet in Vue, but I have and it works amazingly well. Ockham's Python script also helps a lot. (The new "un-Z" is also a great new feature of his script.) First I played around with Mitch's diver scene, that comes with Vue, and flattened the diver in the Y-Dimension instead, instead of Z, since it didn't look right in Z. With some models you may have to use Y instead of Z. Maybe even X. But only flatten in one dimension. I placed the camera directly overhead, loaded the "Others"- "White Back" atmosphere (which has no clouds at all), turned the sunlight colors all to white, and turned off all shadows. Set the sun to Azmuth 180 and Pitch 90. The good camera setting I found was a 100mm lense, which also has a flattening effect. My idea was to set up a "Copy Stand Camera", like the one that is used by graphic houses to copy flat artwork. Mitch's diver, with the water removed, looked just like an Adobe Illustrator type of render once I rendered it with these settings. It's a very different look than what you normally see in Vue renders and some people may think this is crazy, but there is actually commercial art uses for this technique. So it really isn't so stupid, if you know what you are going to do with an illustration. Sometimes a commercial job calls for a "flat art" look, rather than a realistic ray-traced look. This technique gives you an extra trick for using Vue if you like to make money doing graphic illustrations. If anyone wants to try it and come up with an even better way to do this, I would be happy to see it. Ockham's Python script helps a lot in this process. I ran the script and imported the flat Poser scene into Vue and it worked great and it saves you having to try to flatten your poser models in Vue. There are probably other ways to do this in Vue that might work better in some cases, so I'm open to any ideas that others may have. BTW, this is a great technique too for doing Egyptian and Greek wall-type illustration. My Egyptians and Greek ships look just like art ready for pottery or ancient temple walls.