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I'd love to use vray toon more in my work, but it's lacking a few basic controls that would make it much more useful.
Currently, I export sketchup geometry to adobe illustrator via pdf to have more control over line weight, style, etc. - this is a tedious process, and has actually been made obsolete with the Sketchup 2017's GPU rendering options. Sketchup's native line rendering is sloppy at best, and imprecise, and vray toon simply looks more polished. Divide by distance alone, makes it worth using over sketchup's lines. So, I'm looking to adopt a vray toon-based workflow to generate graphics similar to what i've been creating (see: http://www.tooledesign.com/sites/def...?itok=o9GV3AT9). This is a vector graphic with a shadow/ao pass overlay. I'd love to skip illustrator all together, and just render images with vray. Would it be possible to add the following features to make it a truly useful graphic tool?
1. Stroke alignment options- similar to illustrator or blender's freestyle, strokes can align to inside, center, or outside edge of vector. currently alignment is only on center, which often looks very bad for thin objects.
2. Stroke end cap type options - currently a straight end is generated. Would be great to be able to generate a curved end cap, as current flat end cap often produces jagged, unfinished edges on thicker lines.
3. Silhouette control - more control over which objects will generate a silhouette would be very helpful. As I understand it now, silhouettes are generated around groups and components. However, those are the primary means of organizing a model for most people, and not necessarily indicative of where a toon silhouette should appear. If I exploded every nested group or component that i didn't want a silhouette on, my models would be huge and unmanageable. Perhaps an option for turning off silhouette for nested groups/components would help.
4. Silhouette color - often I want to make silhouettes a different color than the internal lines.
5. Global Toon control - I understand that in 3ds Max, toon is an environmental control rather than a texture. Is this right? Being able to apply a toon effect to an entire scene would be unbelievably helpful. I'm very pleased to see the ability in 3.4 to override everything with a material (as opposed to just a color), which helps immenselt to just overlay a toon pass in photoshop. Avoiding this post-step in PS would be desirable.
6. Cel Shading - I know this has nothing to do with the toon texture, per se, but having a Toon/Cel-shader would be huge in combination with the existing toon texture. It sounds like devs may be working on some color ramp textures for the next release (unless i misunderstood a previous post), so perhaps this ability will be available inside of Vray for Sketchup soon? There aren't many resources out there about how to create such a look, so if it's possible currently in vray for sketchup, I'd love for someone to point me in the right direction.
Thank you for considering my thoughts!
Pete
Currently, I export sketchup geometry to adobe illustrator via pdf to have more control over line weight, style, etc. - this is a tedious process, and has actually been made obsolete with the Sketchup 2017's GPU rendering options. Sketchup's native line rendering is sloppy at best, and imprecise, and vray toon simply looks more polished. Divide by distance alone, makes it worth using over sketchup's lines. So, I'm looking to adopt a vray toon-based workflow to generate graphics similar to what i've been creating (see: http://www.tooledesign.com/sites/def...?itok=o9GV3AT9). This is a vector graphic with a shadow/ao pass overlay. I'd love to skip illustrator all together, and just render images with vray. Would it be possible to add the following features to make it a truly useful graphic tool?
1. Stroke alignment options- similar to illustrator or blender's freestyle, strokes can align to inside, center, or outside edge of vector. currently alignment is only on center, which often looks very bad for thin objects.
2. Stroke end cap type options - currently a straight end is generated. Would be great to be able to generate a curved end cap, as current flat end cap often produces jagged, unfinished edges on thicker lines.
3. Silhouette control - more control over which objects will generate a silhouette would be very helpful. As I understand it now, silhouettes are generated around groups and components. However, those are the primary means of organizing a model for most people, and not necessarily indicative of where a toon silhouette should appear. If I exploded every nested group or component that i didn't want a silhouette on, my models would be huge and unmanageable. Perhaps an option for turning off silhouette for nested groups/components would help.
4. Silhouette color - often I want to make silhouettes a different color than the internal lines.
5. Global Toon control - I understand that in 3ds Max, toon is an environmental control rather than a texture. Is this right? Being able to apply a toon effect to an entire scene would be unbelievably helpful. I'm very pleased to see the ability in 3.4 to override everything with a material (as opposed to just a color), which helps immenselt to just overlay a toon pass in photoshop. Avoiding this post-step in PS would be desirable.
6. Cel Shading - I know this has nothing to do with the toon texture, per se, but having a Toon/Cel-shader would be huge in combination with the existing toon texture. It sounds like devs may be working on some color ramp textures for the next release (unless i misunderstood a previous post), so perhaps this ability will be available inside of Vray for Sketchup soon? There aren't many resources out there about how to create such a look, so if it's possible currently in vray for sketchup, I'd love for someone to point me in the right direction.
Thank you for considering my thoughts!
Pete
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