Making Toons

These images are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

I decided to learn how to use DAZ Studio along with a lot of post work to make comic book style art, or toons. Here is the result of my 3rd effort.

I started with a scene I had already used to create this Iray rendered image: Doctor Niella's Cyber Intrusion

I've decided to share the steps used to create this, in case anyone out there wants to do this same kind of thing. 

The first thing I wanted to do was create a reference picture for color. I could have used my original Iray render, but I wanted to learn the process for doing this from scratch, and it didn't seem like waiting for an Iray render was a good way to start. All I really needed was what I see in the viewport of the software, so I made a quick viewport render. To do that, I just went to my render settings and selected Viewport as my render engine.

Now with my viewport visible and the DrawStyle set to Texture Shaded, I rendered the image.

You could select any of the DrawStyles you want for your reference image, or even make several reference images, each with a different DrawStyle. Texture shaded was all I wanted. When you render, you'll get this warning:

So do make sure the viewport is visible. Here's what I got for my render.

Now it's time to create the line art we'll be using as the basis for our toon. Going back to my render settings, I set the render engine to Scripted 3Delight, set Outline as my render script, and set my Outline Directory and File Prefix for my file names.

Then I rendered. This process created 4 images. The render window shows only one of these, apparently called an example. I saved it and it looked like this:

The other 3 images were saved automatically in the Outline Directory I selected earlier. Using the File Prefix I selected earlier, the files were named:

• Niella's Cyber Intrusion_Frm0_ColorID.tif
• Niella's Cyber Intrusion_Frm0_Depth.tif
• Niella's Cyber Intrusion_Frm0_Normal.tif

And they looked like this (though I converted them to JPEG format for my blog):

The originals for these last 3 had transparency, so I took those, along with the example that was rendered, and the viewport render I did earlier, and brought them into my image editing software, each as its own layer. At this point, I'm done with DAZ Studio; the rest of this process is done in my image editing software. Lot's of folks use Photoshop or GIMP, and you can probably figure out how to adapt the rest of this to those programs, but I'll be using PixelMator Pro from this point forward.

Most of the time that I worked, I kept the example and viewport layers hidden, making them visible only when I needed them for reference. They would not be part of the final picture. The 3 layers that would become part of the final picture were transparent, so I created another layer behind them that was just plain white, and that looked like this:

The first thing I want to fix is a line across the forehead, which I recognize as an artifact of the hairpiece. This line is part of the depth layer, so I create a mask for that layer and use the masking brush to eliminate that line. I could have used the eraser, but I prefer non-destructive editing, so this is better, allowing me to bring back the line if I ever need it.

It turns out that the depth layer I just edited is best used for creating... you guessed it... depth. All I do is set the transparency of that layer to 30%, and not only does it make those blacks into light grays, it will darken any colors I apply to other layers in those areas. Now the scene looks like this.

So now I can use this like a page from a high-tech coloring book. I can sample a color from my reference viewport or example layers, and then paint with those colors in the appropriate regions. Each color gets its own layer, and these layers are all underneath the original line art layers. That means I don't need to be too precise with my painting; I don't need to worry about painting over the lines. I would go back and forth between different color layers, painting where convenient.

Selecting which color layers go in front or behind is important as it can save some work. Here you can see what it looks like with just the flesh color layer showing.

Note that while I had to stay within the lines in some parts, there are other parts where i didn't need to be careful because other colors would be covering up my mess. The gray metal color layer is in front of the flesh color layer, so I didn't need to be concerned about the flesh paint slopping over into the metal areas.

Most of the rest of the work was done with more color paint layers, however there were some large areas with sharp corners that were more easily colored by creating large, colored, shapes. The wall is a large, gray polygon. For the floor, I simply took the large, white rectangle I had been using for my background, and changed its color to a darker gray than the wall.

Some colors were added without borders to stay inside. For example, the nipples are colored without any borders. The line-art render didn't provide border for them. The same goes for the lip color. They also didn't provide irises or pupils for the eyes, so I used shapes for those, putting them behind the flesh layer so it could hide any part of the iris pushing out beyond the border. I also cheated a bit on the eyebrows. None were provided by the line-art, so rather than completely freehand it, I copied and masked a piece from the viewport render to make them. I could have just traced over them but I liked this effect better.

So that's my high-tech coloring book adventure. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, or at least interesting.