Toon shading is a non-photorealistic way of depicting lighting effects. While it still shows lighting effects, it does so in a simpler way, with often large areas of flat shaded color. In Octane toon shading is controlled by toon materials and toon light sources. Toon rendering in Octane consists of two parts: a diffuse part and a glossy highlight. The amount of detail in the shading is controlled using a Toon Ramp (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Toon rendering in Octane consists of two parts: a diffuse part and a glossy highlight
Figure 2: The amount of detail in the shading is controlled using a Toon Ramp
Figure 3: To invoke a Toon Ramp node, right click the Nodegraph editor and select MaterialsA set of attributes or parameters that describe surface characteristics. > Mappings > Toon Ramp
Toon shading uses its own light sources, independent from any mesh emitters in the scene. This is done because with area lights you can never render sharp boundaries between different colors in the toon shader. Toon lights are not visible in the rendered image. There are two kinds of toon lights: Toon Point light (Figure 4) and Toon Directional light (Figure 5).
Figure 4: Point lights behave similar to small mesh lights
Figure 5: Directional lights behave similar to sun light
Figure 6: Basic node graph showing the connections of octane toon nodes used for Toon Rendering
Toon shadowing, there is a toon shadowing pin under kernel settings for controlling the shadow color/brightness.