Just a quick look at DAZ Carrara 8.5, so that I know a little more about its line-art features and to be sure I’m not missing anything.
One way of doing it is…
1. New scene | Load figure.
2. Edit | ‘Edit Scene Effects’.
3. Effects Panel, add ‘Filters’ | ‘Toon Part III’ | and edit the settings thus…
It’s now white on black, which you then render and invert in Photoshop.
You can also render normally but with Carrara’s native “Non-Photoreal” engine, after there ticking “Outline” and turning off rendering of Diffuse etc. It seems the better option and the nicer look for line-art. A painterly or charcoal look can be done this way too.
Both are quick. The results of the latter are quite reasonable, in terms of instantly getting a ‘hand inked’ look without needing to then use a Photoshop filter on the lines. It’s quite controllable, though the opacity slider is unbalanced and way too sensitive at the top end. Shadows can be controlled separately from the diffuse. This is a raw NPR render…
What you can’t seem to do is output “Outline” as a multi-pass render layer into Photoshop, along with a ‘Diffuse’ layer beneath it, for further work in Photoshop. You’d need to get them out as .PNGs and then stack them in Photoshop.
It seems you’d probably do better to work up a ‘look’ all done in Carrara itself, and if you spent a day at it you probably could. Sadly there are no NPR render preset freebies floating around the web, offering a quickstart on that.
The ability to work with old Poser assets is good, though Carrara seems to have great difficulty with loading / conforming from a DAZ runtime.
The software’s lack of automation would be a big drawback in production. No recordable/replayable Actions, no ability to write “do this, then that” Python scripts.
Also, as usual, trans-mapped eyelashes are a pain in terms of rendering to line-art. They become black blodges or ‘wings’. No-one else has done so, so I wrote a quick tutorial on How to remove eyelashes for non-photoreal rendering in Carrara.