Octane Standalone Documentation

Toon materials have shadows and highlights that appear as blocks of color, resulting in a flat image with fewer shading colors and a distinct colored ink used for outlines and contour lines. The Toon material can create toon-like shaders and emulate a cartoonish style of two-dimensional illustrations. Toon materials require a Toon lighting node in order to work. They can also accept a Toon ramp to add a color range for the shader’s Diffuse channel (albedo color) or to the shader’s Specular channel (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Toon material parameters

Figure 2: A Toon Ramp connected to a Toon material

Toon Material Parameters

Diffuse - The Diffuse reflection channel, or the albedo value of the toon shader.

Specular - The Specular reflection channel, which behaves like a coating on top of the Diffuse layer and creates a highlight on the surface depending on the incident light angle and the camera’s viewpoint. A value of 0 means there is no highlight at all.

Roughness - The Specular reflection channel's roughness. The appearance of the toon shading’s Specular reflection becomes more prevalent as the roughness of the Specular reflection channels decreases.

Toon Lighting Mode - Since toon lighting is required for Toon materials to work, this attribute defines where the toon lighting is drawn from. This can be from the camera direction, or from OctaneRender® Toon Lights. If Toon Lights is the selected mode, Toon materials will need either a Toon point light or a Toon directional light included in the scene in order to work (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Toon Lighting mode attributes

Toon Diffuse Ramp - The color/float range that defines how the toon shading’s albedo value (or diffuse color) varies over a surface.

Toon Specular Ramp - The color/float range that defines how the toon shading’s Specular value varies over a surface.

Outline Color - The color used for the surface's outline and contour edges.

Outline Thickness - Defines and propagates the outline and contour edges used in the toon shading. A thickness of 0.0 means there is no outline for that surface.

Opacity - Controls the toon material transparency with a Grayscale texture.

Bump - Creates fine details on the material’s surface using a Procedural or Image texture. Often a Greyscale image texture connects to this parameter - light areas of the texture indicate protruding bumps, and dark areas indicate indentation. The Bump map's strength can be adjusted using the Power or Gamma values on the Image texture node.

Bump Height - Determines the height represented by a normalized value of 1.0 in the bump texture. A vaule of 0 disables the bump map and a negative value will invert the bump map. 

Normal - Distorts normals based on an RGB image.

Displacement - Adjusts the height of a surface's vertices at render time using a texture map. Displacement maps differ from Bump or Normal maps in that the geometry is altered by the texture, as opposed to just creating the appearance of detail. Displacement mapping is more complex than using a Bump or Normal map, but the results are more realistic, especially along a surface's silhouette. Displacement works with the texture nodes, and the displaced mesh must have UV Texture coordinates. Procedural texture nodes, such as Turbulence or Marble, need to be converted using the Baking Texture node. For more information, see the Displacement topic in this manual.

Smooth - Enables normal interpolation. If disabled, triangle meshes will appear faceted.

Smooth Shadow Terminator - If enabled, self-intersecting shadows are smoothed according to the polygon's curvature.

Round Edges - Rounds the geometry edges by using a shading effect rather than creating additional geometry. Refer to the Round Edges topic in this manual for more information.

Priority - Used to resolve the ambiguity in overlapping surfaces, the surface priority control allows artists to control the order of preference for surfaces. A higher number suggests a higher priority for the surface material, which means it is preferred over a lower priority surface material if a ray enters a higher priority surface and then intersects a lower priority surface while inside the higher priority surface medium.

Custom AOV - Writes a mask to the specified custom AOV.

Custom AOV Channel - Determines whether the custom AOV is written to a specific color channel (R, G, or B) or to all the color channels.