Another S&T Question: dark outlines

[georgedrakakis]

A picture is worth a thousand words so:

See that thick, black outline around the basic shape? It's very common technique in technical drawings as a way of separating elements within a busy scene. It sort of just outlines the overall shape or "silhouette" of the object. Is there a way to replicate that effect using Sketch & Toon?
hi DaveD,
throw a sketch mat on your mesh and uncheck everything except "outline".
(this will give you the flexibility to control only the outline effect)
then in the sketch material settings you can fine-tune the outline settings such as opacity, color, clonimg, etc.
of course you can experiment using "outline" option along with "border", "creases", "angle", or what ever you want.
cheers,
george

[DaveD]

That technique would work but it would also require me to composite multiple renders, wouldn't it? Ideally I'd like to be able to render the entire illustration in one shot if possible.

[Kuroyume0161]

While it may be possible to get something close, remember that this is called "Sketch" and "Toon" and not "Sketch, Toon and Technical Drawing". :) I've done this type of technical drawing often enough and its not sketchy or toony but very accurate representation with basic rules for line thickness and falloff.

Now, there are sketchy type of technical drawings. This link gives a tutorial that may prove useful:

http://www.3dattack.net/forum/showthread.php?t=140
(http://www.3dattack.net/forum/showthread.php?t=140)
Still seeking other more relevant references or tutorials...

[Shane W]

That technique would work but it would also require me to composite multiple renders, wouldn't it? Ideally I'd like to be able to render the entire illustration in one shot if possible.

To add to what George suggested, if you have multiple objects that you would like to have a common outline activate scene culling and there will be no need to composite.

-Shane

[DaveD]

Actually the presets included with S&T offer lots of great examples including many tech drawing presets that are very useful. There just doesn't seem to be a way of combining these different line style on an object without compositing. Or if there is, I'm not aware of it. Within the Render Settings for S&T it allows for different materials to be used for visible, and hidden lines within the same object. There's even an "Outline" section but I can't seem to find any good resources on what that means or even if it'll help me out with my predicament.

[staffan_054830912]

Hello!

Just make a one sketch material for the outlines and another one for the rest of the drawing and apply them to the object with the sketch style tag. One tag for each material with differnt settings.

/Staffan

[DaveD]

Hi Staffan,

You're right. I just went and reread the PDF documentation (i miss paper manuals) and noticed the example of the robot with the thick, gray outline. After some hunting around I realized that each of those sketch tags allows you to turn on/off lines separate of the global render settings. Thanks for the help!

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