PASS (Poser Art Shaders)Test-Soft Pencil

(Effect as rendered in Poser Pro 11 Firefly. Photoshop used only to composite two renders.)

I bought the PASS (Poser Art Shaders Set) “starter” pack from RuntimeDNA a few years ago, and if I’d played with them back then, I probably would’ve bought a few more before RuntimeDNA went out of business. But considering that I’m much more comfortable with Poser’s Material Room now than I was back then, it’s also possible I wouldn’t have fully appreciated what these shaders are doing.

The “starter” pack comes with a sampler of shaders for four art effects: Halftone, Watercolor, Sketching, and Toon3Tone. I don’t care for Halftone so didn’t try that one, and I couldn’t get good results from the Watercolor set. But I very much enjoyed playing around with the other two.

I set up a simple scene to test out the shaders, and then I applied them to each material zone on each of the items in the scene. Along the way I made various adjustments depending on what that mat zone needed, and I also added back in texture maps with details (like V4’s face, for the eyebrows) as well as the hair’s transparency maps (using image nodes already available in the shader tree for that purpose). I also added in a few custom textures.

The effects don’t work in the Preview renderer (at least not the way I have Poser set up), and that made it tricky to figure out how to light the scene. But it rendered pretty quickly using Firefly, so I was able to do lots of test renders. It worked best with no IDL, no SSS, and no GC (b/c HSV tone mapping worked better).

The render shown here uses the “Soft Pencil” presets from the Sketching shaders. It’s actually a composite of two renders, one with “toon outline” enabled (on “thin pen”) and one without, so that I could control the outline blending in Photoshop.

The next render uses the Toon3Tone presets.

I don’t think the PASS packs are available for sale anywhere any longer, but the vendor (Nightsong) is on Deviant Art

SCENE CREDITS: Bag Chair by LuxXeon; Plant by Esha; End Table by PoserWorld; Room by me
CHARACTER CREDITS: Sasha-16 version of V4 by Karina; LLF Penny Hair; TresChic TankTop by 4blueyes; Surfer Outfit Lycra Shorts by B25SB