NPRD Blue

[DredNicolson]

Stylized renders featuring MakeHuman assets. All hope abandon, ye photorealists who herein enter.

My Side of the Round Table

With more to come!

[loki1950]

Love that clean uncomplicated toon look

Enjoy the Choice

[grinsegold]

All hope abandon, ye photorealists who herein enter.

A good picture is like a good poem: nothing left to take away. Every item has its meaning. Photorealism is just one tool of myriads of others. And we use it much too often without real need, in my oppinion. The internet is full of gurus who try to tell you you have to achieve photorealism, probably because they still are so amazed about themselves that they are able to achieve it. If you can tell the story with less effort, with less color depth, with less render time, then by all means be lazy, go on reducing. The whole Multiverse does nothing else - taking the line of least resistence all the time - from the very small to the very large scale. Who needs fabric normal maps if you can percept the picture without it? Great render!

[wolgade]

Stylized renders featuring MakeHuman assets. All hope abandon, ye photorealists who herein enter.

Nice image. Yes, I love Cycles and I personally try to get as close as possible to photorealism, but there's nothing wrong with images like this. I never tried it myself, but I guess it's much harder to do than photorealism. As grinsegold said it's the art of reduction.

[DredNicolson]

That's a joke, you know. I'm not knocking on Cycles users (much).

You might be surprised just how complicated it is to get a clean, uncomplicated look!

Viewport Shot of Entire Scene

As far as being lazy, I'll cop to not bothering to model a chair or stool, nor is she wearing any pants.
(That's not lazy, that's efficiency! What the camera won't see need not be modeled. )

Coloring with Vertex Paint allows everything in the scene to use the same material (more efficiency!) You don't wanna see the plate of spaghetti inside that node group.

To keep shadows from melding into the darker toon band (causing ugly dark blotches everywhere), two sun lamps are used. One does the lighting, the other casts the shadows with a lower Energy setting (stronger light = darker shadows).

[punkduck]

Yup, sounds simple, but the hidden tasks are: painting vertices and the spaghetti inside the node group. As always I've no idea how you have done it ...

For me it is art doing it both ways. Realistic or reduced comic-style.

I was happy to see my assets like this: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14647

Especially in cosplay people play the role of comic characters. And sometimes a comic version is created from a movie with real actors (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman etc.).
In both directions you have to find out what you can add or leave out when you "translate" the character from one world to the other.
I often look in deviantart for different interpretations of a character, especially when I've done my own version. Some of these interpretations are remarkable and I know, that I will unfortunately never be able to have ideas like this ...

That's the reason, that I also like your picture ... and asked myself if I can translate one of my latest scenes back into comic world, just to see if and how it works.

[grinsegold]

Let me be the voice of non-conformism. "Photorealism" and "Cartoony" are labels that easily can restrict you in your set of decisions you can make while creating a visual story. Whenever you experience a shitstorm because people think they ought to tell you that it is strictly forbidden to e.g. use a pure black background, then you know you should do more like these. The audience has just a crippled mind and needs a larger pool of experience to grow inside. I especially like the render shown above because it dares to mix between real and cartoony elements. I'm glad you had difficulties recreating the "classic" comic style. This is way more tickling in my forehead. "Classical" bores me. CG students often think they should be able to recreate "formal" styles. And to a certain degree that's true, but after that they should forget everything and make every future decision not because they were told so, but because they have very specific reasons to do exactly so. Knowing how to achieve a toon look is good, but it is even better to know where it came from, why it was "invented" and to know why you need a different set of tools.

[blindsaypatten]

Purely out of curiosity, I would be very interested in seeing what a "conventional" render of the scene looked like.

[DredNicolson]

Blender Internal - Default Lambert/Phong

Cycles - Default Diffuse/Glossy/Fresnel

[blindsaypatten]

Thanks for that, it's quite interesting. I can see aesthetic pros and cons of each.

Are the black outline lines automatically generated or manually generated? Or a mix? I can see being able to automatically generate some, but, for example, the seams on the clothes I can't see the basis for automatic generation.