Stylized Highlight - Arnold User Guide
Light
Specify the name of the key light to be used for the stylized highlight. You can specify multiple lights using a semicolon-delimited string as "lightShape1;lightShape2". The supported light types are Distant, Point, Spot, and Photometric.
The Mesh Light and Skydome Light are not supported since they can create blurred results.
- Stylized Highlight does not work with curves. This will be fixed in a future release.
- Stylized Highlight requires subdivision with Smooth Tangent enabled, otherwise, artifacts may be visible.
- The Toon shader relies on UV maps to compute a smooth tangent; without one, you might get discontinuities at polygon edges, or patch edges for subdivs. If you assign UVs, the discontinuities will only be visible where the UV map has a seam. You can also attach a tangent source directly to the toon.tangent, but hiding the UV seams may be simpler.
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| without Stylized Highlight | with Stylized Highlight |
Color
An arbitrary texture (or RGB type node) can be used to create a stylized highlight on an object. If nothing is connected, the Stylized Highlight is disabled.
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| Without Stylized Highlight | Gradient ramp used to control reflected Highlight Color |
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| No Highlight Color (specular only) | Gradient ramp -> Highlight Color |

Using a solid color gives a circularly shaped highlight.
When using a texture connected to the stylized Highlight Color, the following must be taken into account.
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| Area within the red circle of the texture is drawn as the highlight | For a square highlight, use a texture like this |
In the example below, the windowed texture used as the highlight_color on the right teapot renders correctly because there is sufficient space around the image.
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| incorrect | correct |
Size
The size of the stylized highlight.
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| 0 | 0.5 | 1 |













