About XSI toon rendering

[Hirazi]

Looks like the normal Toon Shader "out of the box", judging by the overall effect.
What he or she is doing with the painting is unclear to me... :curious:

[mocaw]

It looks like more to me as the person is either using a custom tool to paint constant shading on the model, or something that is altering the normals (maybe?). Very cool...would like to know more!

[CharmedFable]

Reading on, I found this:
http://www.olm.co.jp/en/rd/2007/07/siggraph_2007_paper.html
Website I got this from:
http://artifacts.sakura.ne.jp/sakanaya/works/

Still alittle confused :|

[ThE_JacO]

she's probably just vertex painting, and then using a vc lookup to split RGB and use them to drive parameters or masking/blending.

[CharmedFable]

Lol, Since I have no clue what a VC Lookup is, I'm guessing it's fully done in XSI(built in tools) then. If so then wow, that's impressive.

[mocaw]

she's probably just vertex painting, and then using a vc lookup to split RGB and use them to drive parameters or masking/blending.

Yes that does look like it! I get too excited sometimes when seeing something like this- still it's a great technique for sure. I can see it helping not have to perfect geometry for toon renders as much which is fairly time consuming at times.

Thanks for the tip off CharmedFable!

[CharmedFable]

Alright guys, I emailed GOTETZ about how to do it and got a picture on the setup ^.^.

http://artifacts.sakura.ne.jp/sakanaya/image/h071008.jpg

[sacslacker]

Thanks for sharing GOTETZ (and CharmedFable of course). This is really clever and it makes me wonder how many cool tricks like this I'm missing by being a freelancer. Sheesh.

[DoF]

she's probably just vertex painting, and then using a vc lookup to split RGB and use them to drive parameters or masking/blending.ThE_JacO do you have any still extant links to good Toon techniques using XSI?
The most informative and exhaustive tutorials I remember were by Todd Akita from Psyop, where he goes into explicit detail about his XSI-Toon rendering secrets, but, alas, all the links are dead:
http://www.xsiforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=293.msg1583
http://www.xsibase.com/news.php?page=23 "Toon Shader Tutorials" about two thirds down the page..
http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutorials_all.html
http://www.edharriss.com/images/tutorial_xsi_Todd_Akita_PSYOP.jpg (http://www.softimage.com/education/Xsi/SelfPacedLearning/Tutorials/default.htm?sorttheme=1277)
Tutorial #355
After that, the closest is from SI Japan:
http://www.softimage.jp/softimage/tutorial_tips/xsi_education/toon.htm
but I have found it impossible to download the movies from here.
If anybody has any advanced Toon documentation using XSI, I, and I believe many others, would appreciate any working links to this sorely under-represented XSI area.
Many thanks,
DoF

[ThE_JacO]

@charmed:
I used entirely too many acronyms I guess.
I meant she uses a Color at Vertices (VertexColors) Lookup first, which is a node in the rendertree used to handle to MRay what is otherwise a geometry property.
Using pure 100% R, G, B after that you can use Pick Color nodes to fundamentally isolate those areas and do something with them, like blending or masking.

It's nothing new, and you can do it in a number of different ways, with weightmaps, UVspaces, VCmaps etc, and it's a way to approach masking from the interactive side since XSI has no raster painting tools, but has very strong (even stronger with Andrea's APVC tools) vertex painting.

@DOF:
Sorry, I'm not exactly big on tutorials, don't think I've read one in the last 10 years :)

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