Non-realistic Shading Effects with Arnold

Hi There,

It’s good to have a Toon shader in Arnold (since 5.1). For me this brings back the old mental ray times. A lot of experiments and surprising results. It was fun and now it’s back. 🙂
By the way please update your Arnold. In the 3.1.2.1. version they fixed a major memory leak (“Fixed major memory leak in contour filter”).

Here are a few tips how to get interesting shading effects with Arnold in Maya.
(Of course as always this can be achieved (and more) in all other software but for me Maya is the most comfortable one.)

The final image.
The final shading tree:

First you have to change the render filter (Render Settings -> Arnold Renderer -> Filter) to contour and in this case I used width: 2
Create an aiToon shader
For a nice contour effect create a aiFacingRatio (turn on invert) node and connect it to the Edge/Width Scaling attribute.
Set the Edge Detection/Angle Threshold to 20 and the Normal Type to geometric normal
To create a nice halftone effect you can do the following:
– create a noise node as projection
– set the projection type to perspective and choose your render camera (Camera Projection Attributes/Link to Camera)
– connect the projection node to the toon shader -> Silhouette/Base/Tonemap
– in the noise node I used this settings (Randomness: 0 means you’ll get dots using the Below noise type):

– modify the place2dtexture node (that is connected to the noise)
I used Repeat UV: 6 and 4 (the ratio is important to get circles)
Rotate UV: 45
– create an aiUtility node – you can change the shade mode to achieve different effects (in this case I used lambert – also looks cool with the ndoteye and the ao type)
– use an rgbToHsv node to get float values from rgb and connect the Out Value to a remapValue node
and finally the remap/out value goes to the noise/Density