- Is it possible to render toon lines from an orthographis view? I have been unable to get this to work.
No. When a camera is put into orthographic mode, all depth information is lost. The Toon shaders require ray depth info to help determine where to place contours. Therefore, the camera must remain in perspective mode. But you can zoom out to an extreme angle to flatten the look.
- When I render an object by itself the width of the toon lines varies as the surface curves away from the camera. However if I place something - a grid, say - behind the object, i get a line of consistent thickness all around the objects profile, which is what I'm after, but I lose any useful alpha channel to pluck the object out with its lines and overlay it on another image. Is there a way around this? Am I missing some setting or other?
Keep your object behind the toon rendered object. Just unplug the surface input of your background object. This will make it invisible within the alpha channel (and black within the RGB channels). The other option is to render in passes with the paint being in one pass and inklines in the other. Even if the inklines lose alpha information, you should easily be able to extract them via luma or chroma keys.
Matt
Matt Lind
Animator / technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com