Hi-- I have completed work on a new rendering program for OBJ (Poser exported) files.

Its open source, located at http://inkulator.sourceforge.net

The program takes a OBJ mesh file and produces a black-and-white render in the style of a graphic-novel (aka comic-book). Its not just another toon shader, but uses a perceptual method of inking the render, so it will look very different from the cartoon render in POSER.

Output is in illustrator (AI) format. I've attached a sample that was converted from AI to gif using Mayura (www.mayura.com). The figure is DAZ3D Vicky2 (low res) and the costume is by the Baron.

Any suggestions/ideas/criticism appreciated!!! TIA

WOW! That looks WONDERFUL! I'm off to read the docs now. WOW!

EDIT: Well, I've downloaded and I'm playing with it, but it crashes with every .obj I try to load. BUT... I haven't done much with it, and I wasn't exporting .obj I was just trying to load random ones. We shall see. This looks very, very promising if I can make it work. ;)

Okay, this is pretty cool. I'm having a little trouble navigating the workspace, but I've only just started. So far, so good!

bonni

Message edited on: 08/18/2004 22:42

"When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch." - Bette Davis

This looks incredible. Well done on something so new and different.

elizabyte one of the common problems with this piece of software is the different flavors of OBJ that are out there. I've tested this with exported OBJ from poser, but my importer needs some more work. I've been getting feedback like this elsewhere, and I know of at least one fix that I can add to address some of this. Thanks for being a tester!!

Very interesting idea. Here's a quick try: I exported an entire scene into one OBJ file, then took it into your Inkulator and played with the settings.

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ockham you are the first with a screen shot! SLICK!!! I've am filled with a parents pride, thanks so much!!

Works very neatly, and easy to figure out from the online walkthrough. It would be nice to have a BMP or TIF output, but PSP does claim to handle AI files.

My python page
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So far bitmap output is what people want most, so I'll try to figure out something. I like to go AI myself and rasterize using mayura (www.mayura.com) $40 nagware that can import AI and export bitmap. The advantage is that you can go to 300 DPI for printing. It should be doing the same thing as PSP. GIMP (www.gimp.org) can do AI to bitmap as well and its free.

A more complicated scene. This time I saved the AI and used PaintShop to turn it to JPG. In this one there seems to be an odd extra facet cutting across the scene.

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For reference, here's what it looks like in Move mode.

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dhenton1000 I d/l ed & set up the exe, fired it up & loaded the test.obj file. It locked up my machine so thoroughly (keyboard & mouse too :-) that I had to warm reboot. So after the reboot I tried it again, same result. Any suggestions? System specs: Win 98SE PII 350mz 224mb RAM

The line through the feet you mean. Artifacts can occur if the geometry has certain properties. The mesh has to be a manifold (every triangle touches another triangle) other wise you will see wire frame lines. Inkulator-->AI-->PSP-->JPG is exactly how I envisioned the output to bitmap pipeline. The whole scene thing is fantastic, never occurred to me!! I knew that if I got it out the door it would take on a life of its own. Thanks!!

cooler I had similar problems with a win98 machine. I think (ALAS) that this program won't run on win98. I'm afraid I'll have to give you the "win98 not supported" excuse. Sorry. but thanks for confirming it!

Les (sixus1) said to tell you that he thought that this is a really cool app. :) --Rebekah--

Holey Crap! This takes poser to a new level!

Wow, I am definitely going to try this out. :) Thanks for letting us know, I'll be sure to post any interesting discoveries I may find. ;) SnowS

my DeviantArt page: http://snowsultan.deviantart.com/

 

I do not speak as a representative of DAZ, I speak only as a long-time member here. Be nice (and quit lying about DAZ) and I'll be nice too.

One suggestion after trying to assemble
an animation:

With complicated scenes, Inkulator seems to
hold something in memory between loads.
It's necessary to restart it for each image,
which seems reasonable. This would be a lot
easier if the camera and ink settings
were maintained in an INI file between uses.
As it stands, the camera can be reloaded
as a SCN, but I don't see a way to save and
reload the ink settings. Overall, I simply LOVE this!!! I've been looking for a way to get this style, for both artistic and scientific purposes. Poser's own sketcher doesn't get anywhere near this effect.

Message edited on: 08/18/2004 23:55

My python page
My ShareCG freebies

.

Hm, so far I can only get the included sample cube to load, other OBJs crash it immediately. I'm on Win XP Professional, 512 megs RAM. Thanks in advance for any advice, take care. SnowS

my DeviantArt page: http://snowsultan.deviantart.com/

 

I do not speak as a representative of DAZ, I speak only as a long-time member here. Be nice (and quit lying about DAZ) and I'll be nice too.

WOW!

Is there a way to export the image directly from the program? I just hit print_screen... Edit: WinXP, Athlon 2400, 1gb DDR RAM and a Ge-Force 4.

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 00:04

---

"you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love." - Warsan Shire

Well your aim is for people looking to do bitmap output,so I wondered about the quality of the Ai file. I took a quick output into Illustrator and must say I'm impressed. The paths were very clean and easy to edit. Stroke and fill...likewise. You've got a winner here. Would like to see sliders instead of text boxes (course I'm lazy). GREAT!! LOVE IT!! Thanks alot,SWAMP

BTW, for those who don't have Illustrater or Photoshop, I discovered that you can also open these .ai files in Paint Shop Pro

---

Jeff

Renderosity Senior Moderator

Hablo español

Ich spreche Deutsch

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Mi parolas Esperanton. Ĉu vi?

bookmark

Sorry for the second post, I tried to edit my first one but it was too late. ;) I got it to work with exported Poser objects like Elizabyte said, and it does it's job well! I hope you'll keep .ai as an export file format though, since it's the best way to get the cleanest lines (and easy to reshape them too). :) BMP or TIF would be nice too, but I think making it compatible with more OBJs would be a good next step. Thank you very much for this cool surprise! Take care. SnowS

my DeviantArt page: http://snowsultan.deviantart.com/

 

I do not speak as a representative of DAZ, I speak only as a long-time member here. Be nice (and quit lying about DAZ) and I'll be nice too.

PC only? This is a win98 box... so I do my art on a Mac.

My biggest suggestion would be to implement some sort of camera controls that are a bit easier to use. I can work this out, but it's a little tricky. Possibly if I was using exported .obj files that were intended for this it would be better, hehehe. Still playing with it. Really, REALLY good start so far. Take my input as input rather than a complaint. I think this could be the coolest thing for Poser (and other 3D apps) since, well, a long time. :) bonni

"When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch." - Bette Davis

The "perspec" box is interesting. Being a photograper,I set it at 20 to get a very wide angle,but instead got a flated portrait perspective. Setting the "perspec" to 150,I got this TRUE fisheye perspective.....backward,but very,very COOL!

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 01:25

(Well maybe not really backward...perhapes the number refers to the angle of view,and not the focal length). I should go read the instructions....but that always takes the fun out of things.

This is WAY Cool! I won't claim that I've figured all the cool stuff out yet, but it looks VERY promising!

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

Great fun...

But it crashes whenever I try to save an Illustrator file. I had to do a screen capture to get this.

-jjsemp

Hey...It does save an image file. I found that it creates a temp folder (C>temp),that saves a TARGA file of the last render. It's called "test.tga",and gets overwritten by the next render,but you can grab it and save somewhere else.

Swamp-- you are right the number is the angle of view bigger the number the bigger the piece of pie (angle) for the camera How in heavens name did you get those paths to work in illustrator? I don't have that program, so its great to see what can be done. You hit the nail on the head, the AI file was chosen TO SMOOTH THE LINES. If you wish to see the current bitmap offering, try some renders and look in your c:temp directory for test.tga. A Bitmap output feature from inkulator really means "rasterize this AI file please." Karen 1473 To get a bitmap output. 1) Get a nice image such as you have (not a self portrait, is it?) 3) Menu File --> Save AI--> mypic.ai 4) Open mypic.ai in Illustrator, Photoshop, PSP,GIMP, Mayura 5) Export as bitmap of your choice Ockham -- I sure hope the ink settings are set in the SCN file!! At least they're supposed to be. I'll take a look. I think you are saying that if you load Mesh A and set camera to Y then load mesh B , camera is going to initial, but should go to Y. I'll look into that too. You are one wild guy. Animation in the inkulator will be quite a trick. I'm not sure that the inkulator is frame coherent. If your object is a flowerpot, and you rotate it in your animation, frame coherence means that your user says "thats the same flowerpot, its just moving around" as opposed to "why is he showing me 32 different flowerpots per second?" elizabyte -- Camera controls have been a request, what is there now is not USER friendly its PROGRAMMER friendly. If you could briefly sketch what would be nice for you I'll see what I can do. I was trying to imitate the POSER way of doing things. I can't thank you enough for your enthusiatic interest!! If I missed anybody, please email me directly at dhenton@users.sourceforge.net, or the email feature here at renderosity.

what is there now is not USER friendly its PROGRAMMER friendly Hehe, I recognized it. My husband's a programmer. ;-) bonni

"When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch." - Bette Davis

jjsemp

do you have a c:temp directory on your machine , supposedly, if you don't my program creates it, but maybe you are on a machine that wouldn't have rights to creating directories?

See other posts. To get AI output you must have a c:temp directory. I might change this requirement if it bothers people too much.

BTW thanks for the freak test, I was wondering how this would work with the newer daz stuff.

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 02:28

If you could assign a couple of color attributes you would be pretty much on the way to a Cel Shader or Color Inker (something like what Illustrate! does in MAX). Like maybe at least being able to assign a Grey Scale value also- so with Black, Grey and White you could assign three color values to them. This could be done in "post" also (like Photoshop) but if possible in your application... it would be another leap forward!

Veritas777

Great minds think alike!!!

Color is the BIG thing I'm thinking about for inkulator9200

Here's what I'm thinking.

Build model with a texture, pull colors from texture, overlay with "Inking"

inkulator9500

build model with a texture, pull colors from texture, overlay with ink. User clicks on ink region, sets "inking density" so that color can show thru in ink area. These two approaches should give the results you suggest.

The problem with color and inkulator is this:

Would a color render from inkulator be superior to one from Illustrate! or Brazil?

The only way I can find out is to program it, and then I'll find out that it isn't!!!

But I'm going there anyway....

Thanks!!

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 03:07

There's real potential here.

From the UI point of view, I'd agree with the comments so far - sliders, spinners, etc., would be easier than text boxes. But it's early days yet, and I think this project will generate enough ideas and goodwill to really take off.

Sourceforge is a jungle when it comes to finding projects of relevance to a community such as this one. Does anyone know of any other SF-hosted apps which might interest Poser users?

Hi Dhenton,

Success! I've figured out how to save an Illustrator file without crashing.

Here's the Illustrator file exported to a gif in Photoshop.

I figured out why the crashing was happening. Inkulator needs to actually be ON the C: drive for it to save the images properly. I had originally extracted the inkulator.zip file on to another drive and was running it from there. Once I moved the inkulator.exe file to the C: drive, my image saved smoothly.

Thanks, this is a lot of fun.

steerpike--

Gormenghast anyone?

The way I dig up poser stuff from sourceforge is to follow the 3D foundry link and visit every item. It pays off (Art of Illusion for example, a free modeler) but you are right, its a challenge.

jjsemp---

beta tester extraordinary!!!!
a dependency on the C: drive is a true BUG. I'll have the user specify the location for the temp drive and if he hasn't, then he'll get prompted for it before he can save to AI.

Your image shows the effect of using the value of going thru the AI step--before and after!!
It also shows the disadvantage, notice the left eye is now fused together and totally black.

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 03:25

Here's an Illustrate sample. I think you are getting pretty close to it...

Here's a grey scale sample of illustrate...

veritas777 thanks for the samples, I couldn't afford the plugins let alone max. I recognize the algorithm being used by illustrate. I even have the original paper. Cast shadows, oh my....

This looks really cool... and when i've had my second... make that third cup of coffee i'm going to have a play with it. (ok, it's just a long winded bookmark) Jack

This looks fantastic. I'll give it a go as soon as I can.

Marking for future reference..... Anyone have any luck at all on a Win98 machine?

<-insert words of wisdom here->

This is remarkable. Remarkable.
Gotta find to play with it....
Some nice programming going on here.
This should be in Poser6 :o)

:] Fish

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 05:07

Arrgghhh, wont save as .ai. It just crashes. Any ideas? Jack

Hey! That looks a great tool... I spent several nights some time ago tweaking the material settings in 3d max 2 for achieving a toonish/inked figure result... exactly like this seems to do! I'll give it a try soon and will let you know my results (in a W98 environment, if i can, -note for Redhawk- ). Just a side note from Italy (snickering a lot... btw i first thought it was a joke when i first saw it...) you might consider to rename it... since in italian that name traduces literally (changing the k for a c) to 'ass-f...er' and... hehe... well i don't think i need to add more! ;)

Stemardue Oh thats not good., I was afraid my Italian wasn't good enough. Alas, sourceforge locks the name in. There goes the Italian users. But I hope they understand, after all I am an American, and English should be good enough for everybody So far win98 looks like bust. If you have 2 hours and scroll through this post, you'll see that 2 others (myself also) had no luck. Hope it works for you. lemur01 Someone else had the same problem, caused by installing on a drive other than C: that might apply to you. I will fix this in the next release.

Oh this looks damn cool I wont have time to play with it till this weekend, but I dig it....specially because of the AI output. Please keep us posted when new releases come out...this seems like something I want to keep my eye on. Rawn

That sorted it. Must be installed on the C: drive. Happy Jack

What a cool thing!

It looks great.

Oh man, this looks cool! Have to wait until my current animation render is done before I can play with it, though....

Phantastic work Dhenton, thank you! I was able to manage this pic within 5 minutes without any problems. (Now to think what I could do with a bit more playtime *grin*)

If I could wish for something it would be the camera handling. I would like to have the possibility to rotate and pan the object freely in the screen...

Great work!

bookmark till I have time to get my hands on it later... Looks very cool...

There may be hope for the 98 crowd, btw. I just loaded Inkulator on the current system I'm on (an Athlon 700 running -98lite-), and Inkulator ran perfectly with the test cube. That being the case, the issue may be calls being made through one of the MS modules to IE (which I don't have installed), the Active Desktop (which I don't have installed; I have the 95 desktop), or some of the other goodies I left out for the sake of stability. So it =can= work on 98SE....finding the issue that causes it to bomb may be a different matter, but it will work! If you need more info on my system config, let me know.

I just got it and I can't wait to play with it. Been looking a long time for something that'll let me do comic-style art again -- I had to switch to pixels from pencil/pen & ink because of a disability. I've tried various filters and actions to get the effect, but none look as good as these examples. Thanks!

bookmark, even if wayyyyyyy late!

This looks cool (and it even comes with source code)! Do you want to keep this as a standalone software or are the any plans of turning this into a plugin for Poser, C4D, etc?

.

RosemaryR
---------------------------
"This...this is magnificent!"
"Oh, yeah. Ooooo. Aaaaah. That's how it starts.
Then, later, there's ...running. And....screaming."

Rosemaryr, your enthusiasm is noted. lol ;-)

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

I got it to work in win98 SE though the only objects that I got to work with it were the sample object and a head morph target that I have. I would suggest trying to make the program more compatible with the different variations of the wavefront object files.

Cool looking product! I'll have to try it out!

.

This looks SO COOL! I've been planning on doing a comic and hadn't decided whether to render it as toon, sketch, or what. If it can be figured out how to get it working right on Win98SE it looks like this will be what I use! Thanks!

I was able to bring an obj in and got a nice render without crashing. Poser Pro. Marque

Would have shown the render but even though it's a jpg at well under 200kb it will not come in. Marque

Not bad. Not bad at all.

And I too would like to see an animation option. ScottA should love this.

WinXP Pro - Athlon 1.2GHz - 768Mb RAM

The liver is evil - It must be punished.

.

WinXP Athlon 2G 1G Ram Works perfectly for me. Color me impressed!

Oh, and PhotoshopCS opened the .ai flawlessly, even gave me options for setting the scale. Very slick!

What a great asset to the Poserworld that will be!

Can't wait to get home & give this a whirl...totally cool!

Looks great! Will check it later this evening. Bookmark

It definitely works in w98... here's a first test result with The Freak (hi poly model) I have an Intel p4 2.4Ghz with 512Mb Ram, Sapphire video card (ati radeon 9x00 chipset) and (maybe here's the trick) the latest (or so) C++ dll mvsrc i don't remember how's that called. Anyway, if i tried to open the original geometry obj file from the runtime/geometry dir, i got an error, so i tried opening the figure in poser, exporting it as obj with the weld poly option checked and here we go! Note to dhenton1000: this is a great tool! But you should work a bit on the navigation side! Other than that I see no major issues (well maybe that of being independent on the drive on which the sw is installed) *high5*

DAMN....I wish I had time to check this out more.....but got one more night to work before the weekend...and then......I have to go to a wedding on Saturday! Oh well, this looks like something that I would really like to "learn" and "use".......so..when I have the time....I will most "DEFINATELY"...try it out. Thank you (:

Sorry for the rush, i was so happy it worked that i wanted to post my result right away... I'll explain my note on the navigation side (even if i saw it was already mentioned as camera handling)... To be able to match the camera POV and FOV with those of a rendered scene (be it in poser or 3d max or other renderers) would be great... i just can't think of how many kinds of cool effects you can achieve with a 2d layered image sw playing with the rendered pic and the b/w ink layer output from ink'r!

To maxxxmodelz: Posting glitch---ooops. Deleting now.

RosemaryR
---------------------------
"This...this is magnificent!"
"Oh, yeah. Ooooo. Aaaaah. That's how it starts.
Then, later, there's ...running. And....screaming."

I TOTALLY love this!!! SOOOOOOOOOOO COOL!!

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

One thing that would definitely add to convenience: put everything including the OBJ name and the desired output image name in an INI file. Then Inkulator could be run by Python directly from Poser. Python could convert the Poser camera angle to the Inkulator angle, export the OBJ, fill in the INI file, then call Inkulator. The inking values would still have to be set manually, because there's nothing in Poser that corresponds to them.

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Oooh Ockham... I hope you (or someone else) can DO that python thing. And that it will be implemented in a version (hopefully soon, I'm in LOVE with that program allready), the major problem right now is the kinda awkward camera handling. I'm a "dial peep" not an "enter-a-digit-peep"

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

That would rule so much!

Wow !!! Wonderfull program !!!

wow! Gotta try this! I do 3d comic work for a living.

It looks like a really cool program. As soon as the storm stops making power flicker, I'll try this out. Ockham's project would be a real god send ! This would be so much more useful for me than using the sketch render, and would compliment the toon shaders nicely. Is there somewhere, a forum or something were we can learn about the future development of this very promising program ? Oh and, last nut not least, thank you so much for making it a freebie !

Gotta bookmark this one :)

Here's the GIRL quickly done. Win XP Home, 2.8Ghz P4, 1Gig RAM. Way to go. Great job. Also like the talk of making this work in Poser with the help of a Python program.

Holy crap! This sounds about right what we're looking for. Definitely gotta try this out, thanks a zillion in advance!!!

This is a lot to digest. I got to think about this a bit. I'm just flabbergasted by the response!!! I do want to mention stemardue points about the MFC.dll. I think this might be the godsend for Win98. I will look into this. I know that on my win98 test machine my dll is definitely out of date. I also know that I am using some newer stuff, that older mfc didn't have. I think I'll try to spiff my 98 machine and let you know. Python, love it. I'll definitely get back to you on that. It actually should be possible to rewrite this puppy to be non-gui that could be called by python so you wouldn't have to worry about the blasted UI. Blender is also python scripted. I will be walking around in a daze for a while, but will DEFINITELY get going on all this. I cannot say strongly enough how much this means to me, I'm am just amazed at what people can do with this. Thanks so much.

I feel like a kid. And Like a kid, I still can't color in the lines.

This thing is very cool. Dual Athlon 2600 MP XP Pro 2 Gig Ram Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB RAM

Allan Thornton

I am sorry I don't have time to play with this now, but thank you very much. Occam, if you do the python thing with this, would there be any way to enable the animation. Something like sending the first frame, on which you set the inks, etc, and then Python calling in the rest of the frames one by one, using the ink settings of the first frame. I only do animations with Poser, but I would love to be able to output a series of frames with this and then turning that into an animation.

Dude, this looks awesome! Need to find some time to test/play!

Now -that- is an idea, numanoid! If Python could control it, and render only one frame at a time, incrementing the number of the image, just about any editor could string the results together...

Now I could get to really like this program! Here's a quick test of scene I was working on. I couldn't get GIMP to read the AI file, though; I had to go through Mayura to convert to JPEG, and you can see a bit of rasterization on some of the lines. Still, I can see a lot of potential here...

Oh, the stats: Win XP Home, Athlon 2400+, 1G ram....

OK, I just downloaded this, haven't tried it out yet, but I just had to chime in with a Wow-Eee. Visions of Frank Miller's "Sin City" comics are dancing in my head...

This has got to be one of the all-time coolest things to come along in the Poser world, ever. Thank you very much for letting us try it out! This image was done from start (in Poser) to finish (in Photoshop) in about a half-hour. Just imagine the possibilities if REAL effort were put into this. Oh boy, my head is swimming with ideas. Here comes another weekend of ignoring chores...

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 22:38

And thank you all for sharing your creations with us! All I can add is another WOW!

FlyByNight

It's great seeing everyone's images in this thread, hope to see more. ernyoka1 I wanted to mention that your use of comic-like halftone is really cool, I was going to do the same thing but you beat me to it. The default Pixelate > Color Halftone filter in Photoshop could be used with Inkulator to create some 60s comic/Roy Lichtenstein-style art that would be visually compelling. Very, very exciting stuff...

Since we're all doing it, I'll post the results of my playing with this for about 15 minutes (admittedly, I had already set up the characters for a test render a while back). I'm having a tough time wiping the stupid grin off my face at the potential this has...

If I have time this weekend, I'll wrestle with it some more. I'm a professional software tester in my day job, so I may be able to really put it through the wringer. :-)

WinXP Pro, AMD Athlon, 1.47 GHz, 512 RAM, program installed to D: drive (as opposed to C:, which has nothing but Windows installed to it).

Dressed up the Girl, exported her as Wavefront OBJ w/ only Weld checked. Z-tooned her in Poser (by hand, adjusting obj color as needed). Rendered & saved. Used Inkulator w/ exported OBJ, exported AI and imported to Photoshop 7, where I fiddled with the Poser render and then dropped the ink outline Inkulator created for me onto the Poser image. Needed minor adjustments because somewhere on the way the two renders were slightly rotated differently. Duped the Poser layer and set it to Luminosity.

And then, voila! :)

Message edited on: 08/19/2004 23:39

Animation is exactly what I was thinking of. (But of course animation is the only use of Poser I ever think of, so that's sort of redundant....) I tried to do one manually; move the frame, export the object, run Inkulator, etc. It's fairly fast, but re-entering all the values got extremely tiresome. That's when the snake popped into the picture.

My python page
My ShareCG freebies

Layering is a great idea. Let Poser do the coloring, let Inkulator do the outlines. That also gives me a neat way to calibrate the Python.......

My python page
My ShareCG freebies

Z-toon and Inkulator are going to take Poser off in brand new directions, I think :)

@ lhiannan: It's good news that you can layer the pictures. I was thinking of that yesterday but didn't try because I thought the camera angles were too different. Did you use Poser's Main cam or the front cam or what? Your picture looks really really great btw. As taken out of a newspaper or cartoon. Ockham, Poser can output animations as series of obj's, right? I think I tried that once. But maybe that WAS the way you were doing the animation test? And it would still be so cool to have Python pick up the objs one by one, ink them and then (with a yes/no option) delete the obj afterwards, as they wouldn't be needed anymore :o) And some option to match the output to Poser's camera(and lights) would be awesome!

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

lhiannan (crossposted, so here goes...) z-tooning doesn't flatten the obj, does it? It only makes the colours more "flat" and toonish, right? I didn't think of using z-tooning, but it's a great idea. I can't WAIT to get home tonight and try it! (stuck at work now for the next many many hours :o( )

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

Thank you :) I didn't Z-toon the obj I exported for Inkulator. The Z-tooning was after and just used in the Poser render, and I think that is what screwed up the camera rotation. Traditional Z-tooning changes the obj, it flattens it on the Z-scale (hence "Z"-toon), making it look like a flat card if seen from the side. I have the Girl parented to an invisible cube and the cube is set to 2% Z-Scale in my render. Camera is the the Main Camera, straight on, 110 focal length.

Well I thought this was going to be too complicated for my wee brain to grasp, but after reading the posts and seeing what people were doing I decided to give it a try. (even forced me to figure out how to export as an obj so I learned something new as well) :)

I will echo the slider/dial rather than text boxes request.

I extracted it to D rather than C and it worked, but crashed on trying to save so I moved it to C and now it freezes trying to save (vs just shutting down completely which is what it did on D).

Any suggestions for getting save to work would be great.

Thank you for sharing this with us. I can see a lot of potential for it with this community.

A few props by dreampaint thrown together, run through Inkulator, simple background gradient added in P'Shop. Again, the possibilities...

WoW! Me likes dis a lot!

Sample idea. Use inking regions as a color modifier

There are tremendous possibilities for this software. Ran just fine on XP Home. Best wishes for the future as you develop this program.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein

Indoda

Oooh now in colours too? This gets better and better. You've got a winner for sure!

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.

Yes, Poser can export a series of OBJ files, if you check "multi-frame" in the first step of the export object action. I'm not sure yet if that will be the best way to go; it would tend to pile up a lot of huge OBJs all at once, and would also require saving a series of command files for Inkulator to process afterward. I suspect it will be cleaner to export the OBJ at each frame, then run the Inkulator separately, then delete the OBJ and delete the command file. The latter would take up less disk space and cause less potential confusion. Will just have to try both ways and see which is happier.

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dhenton1000 the inking regions as colour modifier looks great!

I was amazed that it would handle a scene of this complexity. This was exported by D|S as part of a Bryce turbo import experiment, which failed. Saved as an AI, opened in PS6 and saved as a jpg. Some artifacts are caused by needing transmaps on the squares. Very impressive this software is !!!! Pentium 4, 2.4g with 1g ram

I must remember to remember what it was I had to remember.

Its an impressive and simple to learn program. I have some problems with the obj. Here the Anime doll exported from Poser. It gets some spikes on the legs and the hair. I have importer the same obj to Poser and Cinema 4D and have no spikes.

TG

Sounds great, I really like the fact that the paths can be edited in Illustrator. Will there be a MAC version available? In graphics MAC is still the industry standard, but on anything 3D we really get the short end...

Torulf, it may be that Anime Doll just won't export well as an .obj file at all, or that the export settings would need to be adjusted to get it to work better. I had the same problem when exporting the infamous Creepy Clown model, but as I recall, I could never get Creepy to export as an .obj anyway without grotesque distortion. In other words, I don't think what you're seeing is inherent to Inkulator. You might try viewing the exported .obj in another non-Poser program to verify.

Torulf, I've noticed similar "stalks" on some of my home-made objects. The polygons that go wrong are many-sided, (as in 32 sides). Poser will usually swallow such facets without complaining, but they're still rotten! Theory: Inkulator may be trying to triangulate such facets with a misplaced center vertex???????

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I had problems with Creepy as well. I found that Daz Studio doesn't like him much either. I already posted this render in the Poser newsgroup but I'll post it here as well. Here's the Gremlin in Inkulator. Thanks for the cool program dhenton1000.

I have importer the Anime doll obj back to Poser and to Cinema 4Dand Bryce and I have no spikes in this aps! Its must be something in Inkulator.

TG

ocham you found my dirty little secret my obj reader truncates multifacted polygons to quads. I KNOW I should tesselate them. I hate to admit this, this is my FIRST graphics program and only my SECOND MFC/C++ program. I have a lot to learn. I can't program on a MAC, but from a programming standpoint, a MAC port would take about a week. This is an OpenGL app,and OpenGL is the same whether mac, linux or windows. if you know any MAC opengl people, ask them.

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Is it me or is this topic getting too big? Should we call it a day or something?

I have a solution for export the Anime doll obj. Export it as 3DS from Poser. Import the 3DS in Rhino and export as obj. The new obj works in Inkulator.

TG

dhenton1000 you could start a new thread if this topic is getting too big.

"dhenton1000 you could start a new thread if this topic is getting too big." LOL

Actually another thread isn't the worst idea. Maybe in a few more days when we've had more time to experiment. The images in this thread are mostly "quickies." It'll be very intersting to see what comes of this given some time. Another observation ... one thing I like about the directional ink controls is that they can be used to simulate consistent light source if you don't set them all to the same value.

Wow!!!!!
This is great!
I been trying for 2 years to get this affect(using PS,PSP)

....especially for an old pen and ink type still adjusting to the digital world, even after several years!!!! Man oh man!! Stuff like this is a GREAT reason to hang around here! The possibilities simply abound! THANK YOU, dhenton1000!!

Larry F

Larry F, your picture might look better with the lines less thick.

LarryF You've hit on one of my secret plans for Inkulator. Style variation. This remains me VERY much of the bookcover art of the Dillons, Leo and Diane. I hope to be able to some day to have a style selector with items like "WoodCut", "Kelly Freas", "Frazetta". Never too late for the party.

Thanks for the feedback. xantor -- you might have a point! It would certainly look DIFFERENT! Once I discovered this thread and read through it, seeing all the examples, I downloaded it and tried it out. I made several renderings, but this was the one I liked most - was looking for a Jesse Marsh (Dell Tarzans circa 50s) and/or Hugo Pratt (CORTO MALTESE!!!!) "look and feel"!! John Bolton even comes to mind, as these are people I really like, among others! At any rate, dhenton1000, replied to your IM and I think you have provided a wonderful gift to Poser folks! I for one appreciate it very very much! Gotta go dig out some of my Dillons - have a couple lying around here somewhere. As this program is so good already - I mean it hit the ground running I'd say - it boggles the mind what you might do with it with time and feedback! Guess I should have brought beer, LOL! Thank you. Larry F

Is this cool or what? I am going to tell all my friends who do illustrations. I did this with almost no reading of the pdf... just finding out how to move the model in the space, and then how to render. My photoshop 6 took the ai in and converted it... ended up with a tif that I saved to jpg... pretty cool! The render was not shaded, but the final ai that came into photoshop was! :) Thanks for such a fun thing!! I am sure it will be really useful for those who do illustrations and use poser figures! (came here to this thread from the News forum at PlanIT3d) I used Curio's Ent that I bought here at the market place. :)

Life Requires Assembly and we all know how THAT goes!

Nice Ent! Was that version 1.5 and is that a texture that makes the grey tones?? I don't own photoshop but I've heard rumors that it handles AI files differently than most other programs (sets white to transparent). The reason that I ask is that it creates an interesting hatch pattern that follows the mesh contours. Now that's slick!!

Sorry I have not replied sooner... This Ent is the version sold HERE...and I just turned him around in the Ink program until he looked more shaded in the "light" and rendered...the result did NOT show this shading...my photoshop did that as it converted the AI file as I opened it.... I did note the file was CMYK.... The Ent mesh had NO texture map applied. This was just my first try in the inking program to see how it worked! :)

Life Requires Assembly and we all know how THAT goes!