Toon Shader Overview

The Toon Lens Shader

You can apply the Toon Ink Lens shader to cameras in your scene to render contours over the image. In cel animation terms, this shader does the inking.

When used by itself, Toon Ink Lens affects the entire image the same way, but applying the Toon Paint and Host or the Toon Host shader to objects lets you control many of their ink attributes locally. See Toon Ink Lens [Shader Reference].

The Toon Material Shaders

The Toon Paint and Host material shader performs two functions necessary for creating a cartoon-style effect:

It creates cel-animation style "paint" for shading the surface of your objects.
It is a "host" for Toon-rendered contours, allowing you to control contour properties on a per-material basis.

For example, if you wanted thin black contours on some objects, but thick red contours on others, you would set the Toon Ink Lens shader to render thin black contours and then use the Toon Paint and Host shader's local contour options to render thick red contours on specific objects. See Toon Paint and Host [Shader Reference].

The paint and ink components of the Toon Paint and Host shader are also available separately as the Toon Paint and Toon Host utility shaders (see the next section).

Toon Utility Shaders

In addition to the basic toon material and lens shaders, a number of "utility" material shaders are available to help you control toon rendering attributes separately.

These shaders are available from the render toolbar's Get Material and the Get Shader menus (where they're referred to as "Simple" shaders), from the preset manager, or from the render tree's Nodes menu.

Shader	Function
Toon Host	Contains the ink or "host" attributes of the Toon Material shader, as well as a Paint option that lets you set the base color of the object to which this shader is applied. See Toon Host [Shader Reference].
Toon Paint	Contains the surface shading or "paint" attributes of the Toon Material shader. You can control the base color, highlights and rimlights of the object to which this shader is applied. See Toon Paint [Shader Reference].
Toon Paint Ambient	Contains the ambience attributes of the Toon Material shader, as well as a Base option that lets you set the base color of the object to which this shader is applied. See Toon Paint Ambient [Shader Reference].
Toon Paint Highlight	Contains the highlight attributes of the Toon Material shader, as well as a Base option that lets you set the base color of the object to which this shader is applied. See Toon Paint Highlight [Shader Reference].
Toon Paint Rimlight	Contains the rimlight attributes of the Toon Material shader, as well as a Base option that lets you set the base color of the object to which this shader is applied. See Toon Paint Rimlight [Shader Reference].
Toon Paint Rounded	Contains surface shading or "paint" attributes based on the Toon Material shader. You can control the base color, highlights and rimlights of the object to which this shader is applied, as well as a "crescent" highlight that looks like a partial rimlight. The highlights generated by this shader are substantially more rounded than those generated by the Toon Material shader. See Toon Paint Rounded [Shader Reference].

The Toon Mixer

The Toon Mixer shader is a simple two-color mixer that blends a foreground and background color together using any one of the Toon shaders' compositing (transfer) modes. The compositing modes are described in Compositing (Transfer) Modes. See Toon Mix [Shader Reference].