Outlining problems

Poser 6's toon shading facility has thrown up a couple of problems. When I try to add an outline to figures that I've made and rigged myself (like my Mr Snout figure) when rendering in toon style, the outline refuses to appear in the render. And when I try to add an outline to imported objects in either .3ds or .obj format, the objects turn black in the render. A possible remedy to the second problem, one that I haven't tried yet, would be to turn those imported objects into Poser figures or props first by adding them to the library.
The first problem isn't the only one I've had with my own figures. I tried adding a texture to the Mr Snout figure in Poser 5, but the texture just wouldn't appear on the figure.

Poser 6

I've finally updgraded to Poser 6, having resisted the urge to do so for a long while because the new features didn't seem all that plentiful or worth upgrading for. However, I was sold by the work that someone else has posted on his website that uses Poser 6's toon shading to beautiful effect. Having got the new version installed on my computer, I've been spending the past week trying to work out how to use it to get that Anime look.
Finally, my experimentation yielded some results, as seen above. The wonderful thing about Poser 6's toon shading is that, unlike the technique that I've been using with Poser 5 renders, it doesn't require any postwork, and you can use textures on figures - although it is likely that most textures will have to be altered to make them look a bit more toon-like. You also don't have to have a ground object for the character's shadow to appear in the render.
Work on the website has ground to a halt for the moment, but hopefully it will start again sometime after all the madness of Christmas has died down.

Lionheart

Another image done using one of Lemurtek's characters (Lionheart). Also uses a temple produced by someone and an alien by someone else. I'll post credits to them as soon as I can remember who they were - this is the problem, I've been downloading stuff at a massive rate since purchasing Poser, and have just lost track of who has posted what.

Website

Have made a start on a new website, showcasing some of my 3d stuff, hopefully to give it a bit of exposure, since it seems pointless doing the work if nobody sees it. The difficult thing is knowing what to put on the website and what to put on this blog - it would be better, if possible, to avoid posting the same stuff twice. Ultimately, this blog may end up becoming completely redundant.
At present I am planning to have several pages covering different categories:

1. Links to various handy resources on the web (having come across a fair number in my obsessive searching of the last couple of years).
   
2. Humourous work - I have done a bunch of models in Wings 3d and have turned a couple of them into Poser figures and used them in scenes.
   
3. Razorback. Scenes and figures, and maybe the first chapter of the story for download in pdf form (if I can figure out how to do that!).
   

I originally planned to make some of my models available on the web to download, as Poser figures, but the process of rigging models in Poser turned out to be more teeth-grindingly, frustratingly difficult than I anticipated, and the results, while usable, would be a bit embarrassing to release to the Poser community.

Razorback pic

Here is a picture of Razorback (the hero of my story) and his human friend Matt. They do quite a lot of running away from various things in the story.
I'll be hoping to post a few pictures of other Razorback characters, and attempt to paste these two guys into a proper scene with a background(!).
It's a lot easier to just do pictures of single characters with no background - although I realise that this is bad practice. Drawing figures floating in the middle of a white void was usually sure to earn me a slapped wrist in art classes at school :)

Another guy on a flying motorcycle

Here's another picture, using a character called Wolfgang made by a chap who calls himself Lemurtek (he has done a whole collection of wonderful half-animal characters, available at: http://www.fantasy3d.com/pfiles/thumbs.cgi?characters) The rocket-cycle thing is available for purchase at the DAZ store. I have attempted to do a version of this picture with a city background - however, attempts to paste Wolfgang and his vehicle over the background have been less than satisfactory since he is always surrounded by a jagged outline, and I have no idea how to get rid of it, except to paint it out by hand. Annoying. A more professional artist would no doubt know how to get around things like that.

Some pics

Ok, here is one of my recent images, using a Poser character called "the Freak" (poor guy, it's not his fault he's so big and muscly), and rendered using a technique from a tutorial on the DAZ website. The Freak comes with a whole load of morphs (it took me a while to work out what "morphs" meant) which means you can turn him into all sorts of wierd beast-men, trolls and monsters. Alright, so perhaps that is a bit freaky - probably a good party trick, though. The tutorial can be located at http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/index.php?id=101.
I quite like this guy. He looks like the sort of thing He-man used to get into scraps with.

I'll explain a little about my story. It's a science fiction story called Razorback, and it's about the adventures of a small, green, furry cat-like alien, and his search for his missing adoptive human family. It started out as a comic strip about ten years ago. After about three years, having only got about halfway through a single issue, I decided that, while there are many people out there who are very good at drawing comics and getting them done within a reasonable length of time, I'm not one of them.
Another three years or so later, Razorback still wouldn't go away and leave me alone, so, powered by a second wind, I started again, this time doing it as a written story. Doing it this way, with single illustrations, seemed more realistic, but I've never been very good at drawing figures from my head, and reference material was frustratingly hard to come by. My efforts, through several years at art college, at trying to amass decent reference material, would make a bad story in themselves. One particular afternoon of vainly trying to get a group of friends to be serious and pose for a bunch of photos sticks in my mind as a painful lesson.
Then I heard about Poser. Apparently, it was originally intended to be an artistic reference tool, and it seemed like the perfect solution to the problem. I bought the package, set up figures, added clothes, posed them, and did a lot of test renders.
And they looked too good. Suddenly it seemed like a terrible waste to just put these figures and scenes together and then just draw them. Over time I jettisoned the idea of simply using Poser as a reference tool, and began to seriously consider doing illustrations for Razorback in 3d.

Here is one of my test images for Razorback. It was rendered in Bryce (a great scene-building package, and cheap too), and the render was then filtered using a "Watercolour" plug-in in Paint Shop Pro - there is a group of these plug-ins that you can get called Virtual Painter. The results of using this technique have been variable, and I'm still not entirely convinced by it. (By the way, the picture had to be converted into a gif because the bitmap refused to upload, so the quality has suffered slightly).

Toon shading

Just lately I have been exploring Poser's toon shading options to produce cartoony-looking images, and will attempt to post some of the results here. There is some very impressive artwork on the web, produced by people using "proper" 3d packages like Lightwave, as well as (try not to laugh) Poser 6, which manages to emulate the look of traditional cel animation - in fact, cel-style 3d cartoons seem to be becoming more common now, although it never looks 100 percent genuine. Computer-generated images are just too perfect.