A demo test of the effect of Display Style on Poser’s Comic Book Preview b&w inks.
The starting renders shown below were obtained under the standard default old Poser light preset, and this only had the shadow maps on its Preview lights boosted up to 2048. The figure is the standard free robot that ships with the Poser free content pack, and is totally un-optimised for tooning. (If you save ‘2048 shadow’ lights, label them ‘do not use with Firefly’ – as lights with that setting will reliably crash Poser when making a Firefly render with them).
Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview effect is turned on, and set to b&w inks only.
With ‘three tones’ set:
1. Texture Shaded Document Display Style.
2. Smooth Shaded Display Style.
3. Cartoon w/Line Display Style.
4. Silhouette Display Style.
With just ‘one tone’ set:
1. Cartoon w/Line Display Style.
This appears to be a useful melding of Comic Book Preview and Firefly’s Toon Outlines, but in real-time. As you can see below, only a very few of the Toon Outlines lines are missing from this.
Firefly render with Toon Outlines output only. All edges are inked. For comparison.
Interesting finding: clicking again on an already-set Document Display Style button subtly resets the Comic Book Preview inking lines. If you have “weld” turned on, it does this in a slightly different way each time you re-click, and the changes to the lines can be seen in real-time.
This potentially has negative implications for those making animations (re: ‘edge flicker’), but could be a useful feature for comics makers to note.
Possibly the cause is that the OpenGL Preview is being just a bit ‘loose’ with its real-time line calculations, and not spending computational time on finessing them to perfection?