This is a thread meant to consolidate information on LineRender9000 (store link). I will update this post with additional questions and answers as necessary.
Why did you make LineRender9000?
This product is a result of many hours of my time trying to get good line art out of Daz Studio. I tried many products and was unable to get the control over lines that I wanted. I explored many paths to get lines, and ended up on using the outliner feature of 3Delight - the same concept as the Outline render script example and ToonyCam Pro - but I was able to solve the shortcomings of those outline styles by using Shader cameras. The issues with the other outliner products is that the Normal and Depth outlines don't honor surface transparency, so things like hair don't draw outlines in reasonable ways (they'll draw lines based on the base geometry, not accounting for the surface opacity). LineRender9000 solves that problem with Shader cameras that display the Normals or Depth in conjunction with surface opacities. I know some of your eyes just glazed over with that technical explanation, but it was a huge breakthrough for me.
Where is the user manual?
The user manual can be found in the DAZ Documentation wiki.
It also should have installed to: \My Library\ReadMe's\34653_LineRender9000-user-guide.pdf
I have no idea how to get started! Are there any tutorials?
The Quick Start guide in the user manual is the closest thing to a tutorial. The idea is to give a quick introduction to the tools. Also, check @dreamfarmer & @lain105_b5d599f9e5's google doc, as there's a lot of great info in there as well.
I freely admit there is a bit of complexity to this product, but at the same token, it provides a lot of flexibility and power. The advertisement about LineRender9000 being a toolset is not a lie. There are 3 major components (Render script, Cameras, and Render automation) and in order to get the most out of them there's a bit of learning about what each of them do. The philosophy behind the quick start guide is to provide some settings that provide reasonable results so a user can start tweaking and see what the effects of different things are. After the quick start guide, it's probably a good idea to play with each camera individually to get an idea of the sorts of output that can be achieved. The section on "Use ColorId materials" is important, as that's the way to get the nice, consistent outlines. I'm here if you want to ask questions, but I tried to put a lot of useful information in the user manual as well.
Why are my render times so long?
Render speed is going to be dependent on things that generally cause renders to be longer. In the case of 3Delight, here are a couple of things to check:
- Pixel Samples X & Y are set to reasonable values (4-8),
- Shading rate is set to around 1.0. (The lower the number the longer the render will take.)
- Advanced lighting, especially lights that use Ambient Occlusion make things longer
- Complex (high resolution) hair
- SSS shaders
All of these things can increase render times. For my toon style, I use an ambient surface shader with one distant light (for shadows) and get render times of minutes. I use Pixel samples of 6 with Raytracing enabled.
How does LineRender9000 work with iRay exactly? Isn't it a 3Delight render script?
A simple way to put it is that the line art that LineRender9000 generates can be used in conjunction with regular renders from iRay. LineRender9000 is based on 3Delight rendering scripts and 3Delight shaders, but that dependency is only for generating the line work. The line art is generated as lines and transparency, so it can be composited on top of a regular iRay render.
That being said, if your scenes are configured for iRay there are a couple of limitations based on the how Daz Studio translates the scene for 3Delight. Here's some summarized information, courtesy of @SethM:
- Iray scenes lit only by Daz lights and environment maps will work as epected in most cases (in terms of lighting and shadows) for all cameras
- In Iray scenes using emissive surfaces, the LineRender9000 cameras will not respond to shading, highlights, and shadows generated by those surfaces
- Iray users using emissive surfaces should not expect the Toon and Shadow cameras to work as expected
- In any scene, setting the LineRender9000 ColorId property on object surface materials will allow LineRender9000 to generate geometry-based output regardless of lighting
- The LineRender9000 ColorId property is separate from the "Material ID" property on the default Iray shader, but operates in a similar way.
- One way for Iray users to understand the issue is to say that LineRender9000 produces output as though it were processing the MaterialID canvass that Iray generates
Does LineRender9000 support animations?
It supports rendering out to image series, but not directly to movie files.
Does LineRender9000 support outputting to RIB files?
Yes.
After setting Render Settings so that Engine = 'Scripted 3Delight' and Render Script = 'LineRender 9000', I kicked off a render and it looks like a normal 3Delight render. What gives?
The LineRender9000 Scripted 3Delight render script by itself basically is a 3Delight render. What makes this render script special is that it also generates an additional image directly to file that contains outlines based on the differences in color of the "main" render. What makes LineRender9000 as a product work is that the included shader cameras simplify the scene, which I've found generally gives better line output than "regular" renders do.
What's a "shader camera" and why should I care?
A Camera shader is a special camera that changes the way the scene is interpreted by 3Delight. The cameras included with the product are Camera shaders. If such a camera is active in the viewport when you manually render (in 3Delight or LineRender9000), you should see some differences in the scene. Most of the included cameras portray the scene in black and white, and many ignore surface textures altogether. LR9k AutoRender will automatically switch to and use those cameras based on which camera is selected in the render pass. More information on shader cameras as well as my design decision to use them is in the user manual.
My images are coming out completely black. Help!
There are a couple of suspects for all-black images.
- [main render] The LineRender9000 render script has an option for 'Enable lights'. If that's set to 'No' without any special cameras, it could very well create an entirely black render, because there's no lighting in the scene.
- [line output If Line color is set to black and the file is getting saved as a JPG, the transparent bits will be converted to black, creating an image that's black lines on a black background, which as we may guess will be, well, completely black.
- [line output] Another thing that is a bugger is that Windows will often display images that contain transparency as having black backgrounds, so the Windows preview and image viewer will show completely black images. An image editor that supports transparency can reveal that the images were actually generated correctly.
The LineRender9000 Scripted 3Delight script isn't available in the Render Options! I think something didn't install correctly.
If you'd like to attempt a manual install, here's how to do it: Track down the folder where you've installed DAZ Studio. By default it's "c:\Program files\Daz 3D\DAZStudio4\". There should be folders like: bin, displays, docs, libs, plugins, resources, scripts, etc. From the LineRender9000 ZIP file (manual install option), drop the contents of "DAZ Studio_4.5;4.x Private Build;4.x Public Build" into that folder (this should merge the resources and scripts folders). The specific issue is that these files are missing, which is why the Scripted Renderer option for "LineRender 9000" is not there. You may have to restart Daz Studio after installation.
After loading both LR9k Settings presets (Black & White and Toon color), the LR9k AutoRender script always renders the first one I loaded! Why?
The LR9k AutoRender script supports multiple settings. Loading an additional settings node into the scene won't override the settings, but will add another settings node to the scene (meaning you can have both 'Black & White' and 'Toon color' in the same scene). When more than one 'LR9k AutoRender settings' node exists, the LR9k AutoRender script will arbitrarily select the first one it finds and honor the settings from that node. To get it to honor one of your choice, have it as the primary selection in the Scene tab when launching the LR9k AutoRender script.
What settings do you use in your cel-shaded style?
As far as LR9k AutoRender settings, I am very close to "Toon Color" preset, so something like:
- Pass 1: 3Delight, Main camera
- Pass 2: LineRender9000, Main camera, Use colorId materials = Yes, Line thickness = 3.00, Line threshold = 0.20
- Pass 3: LineRender9000, Fresnel reflected v cam, Line thickness = 2.5, Line threshold = 0.35
- Pass 4: LineRender9000, Shadow opacity cam, Line thickness = 2.5, Line threshold = 0.35
Thicker lines generally give a "toonier" look.
I use Pixel samples of 6.0 and 'Use raytracing' on the LineRender9000 passes to get cleaner-looking lines. (Higher pixel samples will give more anti-aliased lines.)
I composite manually in GIMP and typically give the lines around 70% opacity so they're not as stark. I typically composite the 'Shadow opacity cam' "main" output with the 'Shadow opacity cam' "lines" output, and composite that on top of the image around 30% opacity, darker or lighter depending on what I want the lighting to look like for the scene.
As far as surfaces, they're all ambient, solid-color textures (no image files in the Diffuse / Specular / Ambient properties). I manually edit the opacity maps for hair to convert the greyscale images to black and white, because I want the strands of hair to be completely visible or completely invisible. This gives better color and outlines.
For beauty marks and tattoos, I use a Geometry shell around the figure with opacity maps to control where the darker colors show. The utility of this approach is that I can control the colors from within Daz Studio without having to do texture edits to simply alter the color.
and I would LOVE to see what you can do with him! 
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All I can say is those who own Skin Builder 3 will get a huge discount as this is essentially an upgrade for official Genesis 8 support and is also standalone without owning the Genesis 3 version as all files had to be natively included for this version. In otherwords, textures are all in its own genesis 8 folder and shares nothing with Genesis 3 version.
