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Toon Shading a Mech - Arnold for Maya

This short and simple 'making of' tutorial covers how to use the Toon shader to create a sketch style as in the above image. The scene is lit using a skydome_light and the Filter has been set to Contour for Toon Edge rendering.

Default Toon Shader

  • Assign a Toon shader to the model. This is how it looks using the default settings.

Edge Angle Threshold

  • Let's focus on the Edge parameter only for now. Reduce base_weight and specular_weight to 0. Increase emission_weight to 1.

  • Reduce the toon.edge_angle_threshold to around 20 to add more detail.
Normal Type: Shading Normal. Geometric Normal

Specular and Emission

  • Now let's focus on the rest of the shading. Increase specular_weight to around 0.6 and emission_weight to around 0.3 with a gray emission_color.

Mask Color

  • It's getting there. Now let's try adding more detail to the Edge shading. Create a Utility shader and connect it to the Edge Mask Color of the Toon shader. Change the shade_mode of the Utility shader to metal and lower the roughness to around 0.01. However, this looks too much now and so we need to reduce the effect.

Edge Width

  • Decrease the toon.edge_width to around 0.5 and there we have it!

Try experimenting with different shade_modes of the utility shader on your own models to get different shading styles for the edge parameter.

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