There appears to be a need for a Poser script to quickly apply a colour-adaptive toon material to all surfaces.
There are of course several automated material-replacer Poser scripts, which can work en-masse. For instance, you pick one material .mt5 and then apply it to all your selected materials on a character or prop. Simple script panels such as Transfer Material will do single textures, and XS Shader Manager (looks old, but it still works fine in Poser 11.2) will do much more. MATWriter Panel lets you save a MAT file preset once you have everything applied.
But with Poser 11’s new Comic Book mode, what we now need is a script which does such a replacement, but… which first reads the base colour in the material to be replaced, and then automatically adjusts the colour of the newly applied material accordingly.
For instance: I want to replace all materials on a prop with a neutral two-tone toon material. Where the new material replaces a red material, its colour will be automatically switched to more-or-less the same red colour as it replaces.
I’m not sure if this is possible. The script would presumably need to…
1. Look at the material’s base bitmap, and any colour shading that was being applied on top of that.
2. Then output a ‘best guess’ at a suitable replacement output colour.
3. Then adjust the duo-tone toon material’s colour ramp accordingly.
Having such a script would speed up the process of toon material replacement across a large scene, for use with the Comic Book mode in Poser 11.
One can of course ‘burn off’ much of the prop’s 3D material colour, when using the Comic Book mode (see below). But even when at optimal burn-off, it’s still sometimes not ideal…
Which is why such a script would be useful. It would be like the old llanimeall.py script, but intended to quickly optimise all materials to work with Poser 11’s Comic Book preview mode.
Update: in the animation industry such things are apparently called Matcap (MAT capture) shaders.
Incidentally, I found that the old llanimeall.py Anime script is still available via the WayBack Machine. It’s been overtaken by the Poser 11 Comic Book mode, but some users may still want it for something. For Poser 11 the script goes into C:\Program Files\Smith Micro\Poser 11\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu where I have a FavoriteScripts\Toon Shaders folder.
I sort-of got the script working again, at least on some test shoes, by pasting the whole /runtime/ folder (found in the .zip) underneath that…
But it gives multiple error-messages, and is obviously unable to do the vital mat-cap bit. The script only ever worked on Poser 10 (not 2014, which was the Pro version of 10), and I’ve never heard of anyone but the maker Digitani who was able to actually make his script work.
But even if you don’t want the script, the LLToon.mt5 and LLAnime.mt5 materials may be useful to study, and can presumably be applied en-masse using one of the scripts linked at the top of this blog post.