Alani Rendered With Toony Camera Pro

Did you know you can make manga-style and sketch-style renders with Daz Studio? Compare the first below image with the ones in my previous post. They are renders of the same scene, but this one uses the Toony Camera Pro and a scripted 3Delight rendering engine.

Of course, there are many variables you can play with when doing any 3D render, and that goes as well when using the Toony Camera Pro. The image above and the other images in this post below are just examples of what can be done, without making a lot of custom tweaks to surface settings or Toony Camera Pro properties.

Toony Camera Pro is great for closeup portraits in manga-style. Here’s a portrait of Alani, made using Toony Camera Pro. This image uses a single Spot Light, a black plane in the background, and nothing else special about the environment other than the camera.

The above image uses the Full-Color option of Toony Camera Pro. With a few clicks you can set the camera to do “Half Color Tint.” The render comes out like the one below. The scene is otherwise unchanged from the one used for the image above.

Or you can set the camera properties to do outlines only, rendering a sketch-style image. Changing nothing else about the scene other than the camera setting for doing only outlines, I get this:

The above image uses outline width 1. By double-clicking the correct icon, you can get outline width 2 or 3. Below are example renders of each, using the same scene file as above.

Outline width 2:

Outline width 3:

You might wonder if you can also do the color images but without outlines. Yes, you can. It looks like this:

If you compare carefully between this image and the first close-up portrait image above, you can see that certain lines are gone from the image. You still get shadows, which can look like outlines. Whether or not this is good depends on the needs of the project, of course.

Next is an image rendered with the Half Color Tint setting and no outlines. You can more easily see the difference between this image and the other Half Color Tint image posted above. The outlines easily stand out in a Half Color Tint image.

The background color can make a big difference in how the rendered image looks, too. The next image was rendered using everything the same as the immediately preceding image, but with a white background. Note that the previous image appeared to have a gray background, but the Half Color Tint process turned it gray from black. It doesn’t turn white to gray; you keep the white.

Now let’s throw an outline of width 1 around that, keeping the white background.

The above image easily demonstrates part of the problem with using outlines in Toony Cam Pro. At the bottom of the image, you can see the outline of a part of the skirt that isn’t there. The materials use transparency to give shape to the skirt. The camera can only follow the shape of the skirt model, not the perceived shape obtained by applying a material or texture. So it’s easy to get stray lines in areas where transparency is used in materials. There are supposedly things you can do about this, but in some instances it can drive you crazy trying to get it right. Sometimes you hide outlines on one item, and things behind it show outlines through the thing on which you turned off outlines. I prefer to just take out any offending stray lines using an image editing program, like Gimp or PhotoShop.

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The above images are all Copyright © 2015 by Eposic.