Thanks , though looking back at it i start to see many proportions problems (even if it’s supposed to have comic books-like unrealistic proportions i still find them not consistent with my idea of the creature).
Probably going through some rework, but that’s one of the advantage of dyntopo, you can very easily rework whole areas without having to remodel
Have you given a try to dyntopo Vicky ? along with your modelling talent that i see in your sketchbook i’m sure you would do some wonderfull piece of work
what about a toon shader
then use this edge render on a shadeless white background
Multiply it on top of the toon shader.
Black edges I guess, and use of a compositor node setup to leave the contours only.
It is easy.
Very stable fast and predictable results, much faster than using freestyle.
There’s still a second alternative if you want to avoid freestyle, and that is creating the edge rendering through the compositor (which might be more straightforward because you can produce previews of what it will look like as well as eliminate the need to re-render when making changes).
With Cycles, you can even create a copy of the scene on another layer with alternative materials (complete with mirrors and the like), and use that as the map for your edges). Other than the lack of FSA, it tends to look pretty good (note that I said to use Cycles here, BI’s compositing has a serious limitation where mirror objects in one render-layer will reflect objects in all layers due to that engine not having access to something like the ‘exclude layers’ feature).
EDIT: I have made an example of what you can do with the additional compositing features available in Cycles and the available filters that can be used for edge detection. (using the technique where you have a copy of the scene in another layer, but with different materials specially designed for exposing edges).
It has the thickness variation for major and minor edges just like the old edge-render, and this time there’s no outlines created within the texture on the sphere.
It doesn’t look right Ace.
But, how?
These examples are fine but not correct.
Freestyle can do much better of course (on these examples, full control)
Now. please try it on a dyntopo mesh please. A dense one.
Anyway, Ton decided to get rid of this old edge render. Just fine.
What makes me mad is that I have the feeling, this edge render has something to do with some cavity effect.
We don’t have a cavity effect under renders now.
The closer we have is dirt under Vertexpaint.
We should have such effect on the fly, we should have it as a mask under texture painting.
(Industry standard LOL)
Please Ace, don’t comment this last lol, truly, not sarcastic at all.
If you mean the lack of the sketchy look based on the images in Doris’ post, then yes, it’s possible to do that through Cycles and the compositor as well.
I used a dense displacement mesh instead of a Dyntopo sculpt, I figured it would be a good and quick way to see if the method can hold up with that type of dense mesh (which it seems to have done with a few tweaks, and yes, it’s still a lot faster than Freestyle).
Though by now, some tend to be so specific on certain things that the only way to please everyone would be for the Blender source to keep every line of legacy code that was written since the 1990’s, even if it means Blender is bloated and slow from the weight of all of all that code and the messiness that ensues as a result. Someone even suggested recently that the Blender devs. should’ve kept all of the old, crufty, and messy 2.4x UI code and have that as an interface one can switch to. (and developers tend to have good reason why some old code and why some old functionality just has to go from time to time).
@Ace
I already mentioned that I would like to trash half of blender if I could. And have the developers to re write it from scratch.
These are just talking. You know.
You didn’t post the cycles node set up. Please? I hope it isn’t something very complicated.
(It is and needs some further work in composer, I’m aware of this, JuanJosé Torres already posted on this topic)
Results are not like Doris’s posts though.
Everything you need for the edge effect is packed into a single node group in the compositor, which allows you to set the renderlayer used for the edges as well as the colors of the major edges and sketch-markings.
Thread’s still full of gorgeous stuff… I will have to start contributing again… As far as the whole Cycles debacle, I love it, but my computer does it so slowly… BI is just so much faster.
@Ace: This thread is not so much about toon as it is about the edge. If you look at the first post you will see that is is a plant made up of glowing edges. Can you cobble together that look for us in Cycles?
Meanwhile, there is a nice trick in compositor. If combined with the appropriate lighting set up it produces NPR-like renders.
This method may be more advanced because it also converts textures to NPRs. IMO much better than freestyle. It also works well with cycles renders.
