I was very inspired when i saw Damien Nenow's Paths of Hate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZn65LA2w90 as he really made a comic book come alive! (here he talks about his workflow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBovH7_um_s)
The look for my lines i would really want is that of the great Moebius (RIP) : https://www.google.nl/search?q=moebius& ... KAOuPYoMMJ
Basically i want to simulate a rotring inking style - consistent line thickness with perhaps a little wobble and some "interruptions" - not all lines are constant, little breaks.
Now i plan to do a lot with textures maps like mr.Nenow but i'm having some trouble with getting the "base" lines right:
Mental Ray Toon Ink Lens
The main problem i have with this one is the "spread" - the line width and line detection are annoyingly linked: when you want more line detection (and i usually do) the line also get thicker and it even starts do some blotchiness in parts. Also it suffers from "bunching" - when you zoom out little details will turn black because lines are getting too close together. Consistent line thickness is good but it should have some sort of override when lines start bunching. Now you can overcome this somewhat by giving small objects a lower threshold with distance but this doesn't work for everything, note the pilot's fingers.
3Delight Toon Ink Lens
Faster even with just the two free cores but a lot of the options don't work so you have the same problems as with MR but there's less you can do about them...
And speed isn't that much of a factor as it's all fairly fast.
VRayToon
This has the good thing of seperating the line detection (normal threshold and overlap threshold) from the line width. Also you can plug in some nodes to get a little bit of play in the line style like varying opacity. Big downside is very little other options - you can only include or exclude objects, no host material.
Incidence plus Photoshop
This is this method http://www.3dluvr.com/rogueldr/tutorial ... n_ink.html and although it tends to not suffer from buncing it has a brush like effect in the lines - nice but not what i'm looking for unfortunately.
I look at envy at cebas finaltoon for and sketch and toon for cinema 4d - any way to get such broad effects in SI? When i read up on things like Tekkon Kinkreet and the Animatrix done in xsi back in the day they often talk about "custom shaders" but i can't really find any tutorials to point me in the direction of doing more than just playing with Toon Ink Lens settings... Any thoughts/tips/pointers would be most welcome!
(oh and yes i've seen the Tod Akita and Kim Aldis NPR vids on youtube)
