CG line drawing

[Ernest Burden III]

I have used a variety of techniques over the years to produce line drawings. First, of course was taking a Rapidograph and drawing on paper with ink. Then I used a pen plotter to do the same thing only this time I'm watching it draw. And it could draw really, really fast. Then I used Photoshop and inkjet printers, most recently I've done lines with layering two rendered images with opposing lighting and then Photoshop's lines filter.

 

But what I haven't used yet on a project was regular CG lines. But I had a project where the architect specifically wanted a digital line drawing because his client loves them. So that was my assignment.

 

But I didn't want to hand in a CAD line drawing, even if I was able to address lineweights a bit. I wanted to bring in a little bit of what was nice about an old inked drawing. No matter how good you were with the pen and straightedges and triangles, the lines had some character. I used the C4D Sketch&Toon package to program some lines.

 

I'm not sure if I can show the whole renderings (three views) but here is an overall test view without the design in place. I'm really happy with the mix of lineweights and the overall look. Also, here is a crop of one of the finals at fullsize. You can see how the lines are slightly darker at ther ends, when your hand slows down, and even though you weren't trying for any overshoot, you still had a little.

 

If anyone else has linework that you've done please post it!

 

When I worked out this line style, I did a test animated pass, which I hope to post tomorrow.

[Ernest Burden III]

I should add that the model for the line project was a very involved design (to understand and build) that I had to put together in a very compressed time, so it wasn't perfect. The model was about 210,000 polygons. Sketch&Toon can be quite slow when you build complex line effects. But this simple style rendered the model at 3000 pixels wide in about 5 minutes.

[AJLynn]

I've been doing some Sketch&Tooning recently. Any ideas about this one - if you use a parallel projection clipped camera to make a section (yeah, it's a big ol' kludge) how do I get the lines of the objects behind the camera to not be there?

[Ernest Burden III]

I'm not any sort of S&T expert. This work I just handed in was probably the first time I've used it on a project.

 

For your section--have you tried using a boolean to cut the section? I've done that to remove parts of a model I don't want to see and it works nicely. In fact, when i was using that technique was also when I was experimenting with S&T for linework, though I didn't use it for the final since it was too slow.

 

Also--S&T is hard to control with situations where you use different sketch tags on objects. I find when i do I get some lines showing up from behind objects that should hide them. Why? I don't know yet. But I think it is a solvable problem.

[Frosty]

These were completed about 2 years ago. I used AO with sketch and toon.

[AJLynn]

AO and S&T just go so well together. Can't post my most recent stuff but I'll see if I can't find anything else around here that I can...

[Ernest Burden III]

AO and S&T just go so well together.

 

I agree, though you can forget about that 5 minute rendertime if you add AO. I think Steve's example is really nice, especially the use of very selective but strong overshoot. However I find the AO to be too broadly applied. Its like Tabasco sauce--a little goes a long way.

 

AJ, can you post some cropped portions, like I did, of the recent stuff you mentioned?

 

Does Max have a program like S&T?

[AJLynn]

Max has finalToon, which is similar but not as good in terms of how much flexibility you have with the line styles.

 

Here's another urban bit - I cropped to get a reasonable size instead of resizing, but it's from the site plan of a studio project I did a while back, that I'm using to experiment on. I'll find something on an architecture scale that I can post.

[Tommy L]

Is there anything similar in vray? I have tried using vraytoon effect and dirtmap before, It renders very fast, but looks 'cartoony' rather than drawn. Kind of like a new simpsons rather than an old one. I dont know of any way to vary the linetype (overshoot and variable weighting). Is there a plugin/shader out there that makes these possible? In fact it doesnt have to be vray, anything in max that will offer overshoot and lineweight?

....maybe Ill have to learn a little programming after all....

[AJLynn]

Ink&Paint has some lineweight options and mental ray's Contour system has some new shaders that I haven't tried out yet, you can get depth cued lineweights but I don't think I've seen an overshoot option.

[Tommy L]

Yeah vray toon does the z-depth regulated line-weight, but its tooo uniform and its a post effect, so its global. Ill open pandora's Mental Ray box again, see whats lurking in the the misty cavern....

[AJLynn]

Try using mental ray with Material Override using a mental ray material that has Output in its surface slot, plus a contour shader. Output will blow it out to white and you'll just see the line pass, which you can comp in. You might need to crank the image sampler up to some ridiculous setting like 4/64 or 16/64 to make all the lines come out right.

[Ernest Burden III]

Well, Sketch&Toon just earned my respect. It also earned me a month's minimum sales target in a little over a week.

[Frosty]

Ernest, I've eagerly awaited your adoption of SaT ever since I reviewed it 2+ yrs ago. I was initially blown away by its flexibility and quality. I immediatly saw its potential but was overwhelmed with re-thinking my entire workflow and aesthetics. The module requires a slightly different model structure and a major re-thinking of how you texture and create shaders. Luckily SaT comes with a great many presets to begin from. I know someone with your illustrative eye will take this far past anything I ever could.

[Ernest Burden III]

I know someone with your illustrative eye will take this far past anything I ever could.

 

Your check's in the mail.

 

 

I mentioned an animation test. Here it is, I used an existing model and didn't try to show trees. I'll figure how to do that best in the future if line art is requested by a client:

 

http://www.acmedigital.com/temp/LINETEST01.mov

[Angela Giladi]

Hello Ernest..not sure if the link works..waiting quite a long time to download

 

Angela

[AJLynn]

It's pretty slow even on the same side of the Pond, but it does work, and it's pretty cool.

[moshenko]

As a Max user I'm quite jealous of the linework I'm seeing in these examples from Cinema. I've used both Brazil Toon and VRay for linework in the past and, while they have their uses and strengths, both lack the ability to produce really "drawn" lines, particularly line extensions. Brazil probably comes closest but it's definitely geared more towards toon (as the name suggests!) than a "drawing" engine. I used Illustrate for a time, but it was not compatible with some Max components at the time (I can't recall what the exact issues were now).

[DavidR]

As a Max user I'm quite jealous of the linework I'm seeing in these examples from Cinema. I've used both Brazil Toon and VRay for linework in the past and, while they have their uses and strengths, both lack the ability to produce really "drawn" lines, particularly line extensions. QUOTE]

yOU SHOULD look at cebas' final toon -it does exactly that, and as a real-time post effect, so after you render, in the open framebuffer, you play with line weight, type, overshoot, colour, etc. It's really good, AND it's vector, so you can save the lines as .ai for other use, which you can't with Ink'n'Paint, although it's also excellent for it's intended use. You can use mental ray to output a true vector image, but the lines are actually segments made of 'boxes' once you get them to Illustrator, so if you need clean, that's not the way to go. I've never thought of combining AO with lines -it looks great and I'm itching to try it out -thanks for the tip!

[Ernest Burden III]

yOU SHOULD look at cebas' final toon

 

Its possible that Cebas wrote Sketch&Toon for Maxon. They wrote a few other modules.

 

I should compress that animation more and re-post it. I made that for hard-drive playback and was lazy so put up the file I already had. Sorry about the slow DLs.

[Tommy L]

I downloaded the animation. It loses alot of what the still has. The great thing about the still is the instilled inconsistencies of lineweight, heavier at the ends etc. If the animation could vary these parameters and key-shift the lines some, it might look like stop-motion or flick-book animation. That would be cool.

[Ernest Burden III]

inconsistencies of lineweight, heavier at the ends etc. If the animation could vary these parameters and key-shift the lines some, it might look like stop-motion or flick-book animation. That would be cool.

 

The most common criticism of my animation work is a flickery effect that I get by adding random noise. So I was glad to see for once something come out of my hands that wasn't dancing about. However, having said that, with S&T you could very easily animate those things. You could have the lines vibrate with randomized variations, or have the heaviness vary by distance, etc. Its all there. But the more effects you program in the longer the rendertimes get. For the animation, I think I had times well under a minute per frame. But add lots of dynamics to the lines and I would quickly be looking at many minutes per frame.

 

I think the various weights read pretty well, and I'm happy with this piece as a test of the line style.

[moshenko]

Ernest, I watched the animation too and I thought it was quite attractive. I would like to see a version with the same line styles but more exaggerated (heavier widths overall). With the still images one gets a chance to study the linework at a decent size but at animation resolution I think it needs more emphasis. Animating the linework itself could be fun but I like the sereneness of your sample already.

 

DavidR, thanks for mentioning FinalToon. I may just check it out!

[Frosty]

I'm posting a sample animation I did as well. Again I used Sketch and Toon with AO. All of the people/trees are simply CAD blocks turned into splines for use in C4D. I used my standard "look at camera" method.

http://www.jlgarchitects.com/temp/SandT.mov

[Ernest Burden III]

All of the people/trees are simply CAD blocks turned into splines

 

I like that they are 'see-through'. You aren't pretending they are more than they are.