Psoft’s Pencil+ Review and Workflow Tutorial

So you want a cartoon effect or some inky lines on your 3d model and you’re tired of messing with Max’s standard ink ‘n’ paint shader. I shopped around a bit and toyed with the idea of learning another 3d application but there really is no need. Pencil+ by Japanese company Psoft can fulfil all your sketchy 3d needs.

A quick list of some examples of how I’ve successfully used this product:

- “Sketchup” style renders and fly-throughs for architectural visualization.
- White chalk 2d characters on black paper.
- Building schematic wire-frames.
- 18th Century “extruded” map of Dublin.

Note: These effects were for animation, not just stills which can be fudged in Photoshop.

All of these effects (and many more) are very easy to achieve in Pencil+. It’s easy to pick up and use straight away and there is an interactive setting which lets you see exactly how the finished line will look, any changes you make to the brush and line settings will be updated in real-time without a re-render. There are so many well named tweakable settings that you can have whatever line or brush style you want in a couple of minutes and the defaults are good enough to use without any brainpower at all.
It’s also cheap. You’ll find you’ve saved yourself money within the first two days of any project requiring this kind of look. And hey, it even works with V-ray and the network licence is free!!

Rendering time is a joke. I rendered a 3 minute 33 second music video at 1828x1332 in the dreaded scanline on an 8 year old student grade machine (maxed out RAM of 1GB and the mouse and DVD drive have just died, poor old thing) and it ren¬dered overnight.

If I have to be critical I’m a bit annoyed with animating this plug-in. It can cause some problems and slow down a bit if you animate the settings. Also navigating the track editor and keys of this plug-in is frustrating. But on the other hand there is a box you can check called animated line which gives the instant feel of that shaky classical animated look without any mental strain so it won’t be often you’ll need to animate anyway.

Second problem: The Pencil+ material that comes included is just not really user-friendly and the times I tried it, I may as well have been using ink ‘n’ paint. I imagine this is because they sell Liquid+, a beautiful looking material shader capable of a wide variety of effects. I haven’t tried it so I cannot confirm anything but if it’s anything like it’s sibling Pencil+ then I can only imagine the possibilities it could open up for non-realistic shading.

In case you get your hands on a copy (there’s a trial on the site), here follows a very brief introduction to the workflow of Pencil+.

First off, Pencil+ needs a license for every computer and has to be activated for each computer separately via their web site. There are plenty of instructions in the help file and on the site.

NB: It doesn't work in 64 bit yet but with Max 2008 this isn’t really a huge workflow problem.

There are extensive help files on using it but the basics are as follows:

To turn on Pencil plus effects go to Render->Effects->Add... Then click Pencil+ 2 Line. All the settings, options, buttons and switches have an explanation in the help by the way.

Never render with crop or region, Pencil+ does not like this.
Use view.

Important buttons:

Preview-> Interactive check box.

Click this when you want to play around with your brush set¬tings. It will immediately render your scene (like pressing F9). Then whenever you make changes it will update. The more complex the scene the longer it takes to update. Some settings will not update.

I recommend using relative line size as the absolute can be unpredictable and look strange with moving objects/cameras.

To add the effect to your scene in base parameters->line sets->add.

Rename the set and add objects or materials as you wish.

When you're happy with your brush settings you should save the set. Having a base set for your scene is very useful.

When you need to have a slightly different line effect on different objects or materials then you load your base set and tweak that instead of starting fresh.

Visibility Line and Invisibility line:

When you alter the edge detection settings you will need to update scene or turn off and then turn on the interactive button.

Reduction:

You should turn this on for rendering anything in 3d space. It adds the illusion of perspective. Lines get thicker closer to the camera.

Remember!

Try not to animate the brush effects. It goes a bit mad for me.

Also if an object like an opacity map or a refractive object occludes the line, then the line will not be visible. It doesn't work well with opacity maps.

As far as the Pencil+ material goes I haven't had a lot of success with it and I would recommend getting Liquid+ if it's an important aspect of your renders. Or just coming up with another solution. Often in Max there are ways of cheating these material type effects.

Good luck.