Does Octane improve Toon Shade Rendering in DAZ Studio ?

[prabhatM]

I use DAZ 4.5. I mostly do large scenes with large number of characters. But I rarely use textures.

Most of my work is TOON SHADED. I use PWTOON, Built-in Toon Shader and Visual Style Shader.

I am desperately looking for a solution to increase the rendering speed to meet my deadlines.

May I request friends who are using DAZ 4.5 and Octane give me a feedback if Octane can truely improve the "Toon Shaded Rendering" ?

Or does it just improve the rendering for Texture based models and animations ?

I am not sure if the technical team would have time for this question, so a help from users shall be truely appreciated. This will help my purchase decision.

[face]

Octane hasn´t a toon shader...

face

[t_3]

I use DAZ 4.5. I mostly do large scenes with large number of characters. But I rarely use textures.

Most of my work is TOON SHADED. I use PWTOON, Built-in Toon Shader and Visual Style Shader.

I am desperately looking for a solution to increase the rendering speed to meet my deadlines.

May I request friends who are using DAZ 4.5 and Octane give me a feedback if Octane can truely improve the "Toon Shaded Rendering" ?

Or does it just improve the rendering for Texture based models and animations ?

I am not sure if the technical team would have time for this question, so a help from users shall be truely appreciated. This will help my purchase decision.

hi prabhatM - as face already wrote, octane - thus the daz plugin - has no special mode to do toon style rendering. having full access to the octane api and its possibilities, it would be still interesting to find out, if it is somehow possible to mimic that with octanes' standard features. i will definitely have a look into this as i would love to do some more "uncommon" things with octane through the plugin, but _even if possible at all_, don't expect to see something in the near future - sorry.

i'll put this on my "experimental" list, and will of course post some news, if there is a chance to get something in that direction...

[prabhatM]

Hi Guys,

Thank you for your feedback.

DAZ has 2 modes of rendering. Normal and Cartoon rendering. In second mode, it renders the whole scene into cartoon style. Though this is good, I prefer the other method i.e. I use "TOON MATERIAL /SHADES" in the objects and then render in "normal mode". This allows me to mix normal texture and toon style shades in a character. For example, I keep eyes and eyelashes in normal texture ( natural look ) and skin , clothes etc in Cel shades. After that I render in "Default mode".

You may try the default ORANGE TOON SHADE in the Surface/Material for applying to any object .

Or, you may ask DAZ team to share PWTOON and VISUAL STYLE SHADER for you to experiment with.

[ First we need to confirm if DAZ's PWTOON and VISUAL STYLE SHADER work with OCTANE or not. They work very well with 3Dlight renderer. ]

In Cartoon business, the margin is falling. Therefore, the speed of execution matters a lot. I am truly looking at real time manipulation of large scenes ( crowd / Plant eco system ) and SPEED of rendering.

A feedback will truely be appreciated.

[t_3]

You may try the default ORANGE TOON SHADE in the Surface/Material for applying to any object .
Or, you may ask DAZ team to share PWTOON and VISUAL STYLE SHADER for you to experiment with.
[ First we need to confirm if DAZ's PWTOON and VISUAL STYLE SHADER work with OCTANE or not. They work very well with 3Dlight renderer. ]

In Cartoon business, the margin is falling. Therefore, the speed of execution matters a lot. I am truly looking at real time manipulation of large scenes ( crowd / Plant eco system ) and SPEED of rendering.
A feedback will truely be appreciated.

the reason, why this is not directly possible is - no matter what daz shader or rendering style is used - that octane uses a completely independent material system, primarily aiming to create realistic natural looking materials.

octane currently just has no rendering mode, which will allow particular materials to be rendered flat or even cel-shaded, since this would be completely against the basic idea of rendering in octane. the plugin transfers daz shader characteristics as much as possible to octane, but the shading style itself can not be replicated. sorry to say, but octane and/or the plugin won't be of help for you as of to date, and probably not in the near future.

if you like to spend the time, you may download a copy of the octane standalone demo, export scenes from daz studio to render them there, and try what you can achieve, but imo it will be nowhere near the example you posted. i'm also not aware of any commercial gpu renderer, that utilizes cel shading.

imo the currently best (and at least somewhat realistic) option to speed up your processing would be to use a game engine which provides realtime toon shading through DirectX or OpenGL - though it would not be an easy task to integrate this in your production pipeline...

[prabhatM]

Thank you for your advice. Since DAZ per se does not use GPU, I was hesitating in investing on a GPU. Then the news about Octane having a DAZ Plugin sort of gave me hope.

I hope somebody in your team think of the large Cartoon industry out there. The whole animation industry begun with a humble cartoon. Hope nobody forgets that. And this cartoon industry needs a quick renderer to beat the cost.

Thank you again for your time.

[mib2berlin]

As long Octane don´t fit your needs take a look to the Blender freestyle project.
It is planed for next release Blender 2.67.
In this (very long) thread are many examples and informations about freestyle.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... ost2340050

Cheers, mib.