3rd Year: Arnold Toon Shader

So in Maya 2018 the Toon Shader has been removed entirely as well as mental ray, so in order to achieve a Toony effect there are certain traits that can be tinker with in order to create this simulation.

Now of course this isnt going be exactly like hitting a matwerial and hitting apply but rather some traits need to be added to a material in the hypershade in oder to modify the materials properties.

For this I'm using an ai'StandardSurface, but this can be applied to multiple materials. Keep in mind every time you want this shader you will need to repeat this process and tweak it to your liking, but you can duplicate this set-up and change the colours rather then having to set this shader up over and over again.

So in order to make this toon shader you need 3 things, your base material, so in this case "Red",  an Ai'FacingRatio, an AI'Color'Correct and a Ramp Shader.

The basic things that need to be taken into account are that in your based colour, it is importatint that you turn your weight and specular both to 0, and your emmision up to 1. This will allow you to use the single channel to emitt colour rather than everything at once so the shader doesnt blur or look realisitc.

Its also importaint to rmember to turn your interpolation to linear. This will make the shader block colors, so that the material doesn't blend, other than that if you want the same colour only at different shades then you should only use colours inbetween black and white, using acutual shades of color can end in weird results.

In order to get the colour you need to change the multiply in Ai'Color'Correct to the color of your choosing. Like said earlier however just be careful how this colour may be effected by your ramp shader.

Once finished you should have something like this. The shader will appear white in the viewport and can only be seen in the render view, but because of Arnolds 'Arnold Renderview' you can tweak the shader in real time in order to get the effect you wish.

So the V Co-ord is the Co-ord from where we are viewing it from, so when the ai'Facing'Ratio is plugged in, the system calculates what the shader will look like from where we are viewing the object from. The ramp controls where our shaders color tones comes from, like light tones and dark tones. The color correct allows us to have a based color directly effected by the way the ramp is laid out, and finally, because we have turned off the base weight and specular weight, and turned on the emission all the way to 1, that is the main channel from which the color is exported.

V-Ramp

Diagonal-Ramp

U-Ramp

Tartan Ramp

I still don't know all of the kinks with this method yet, so if anyone knows anything I either missed or  incorrectly explained, just pop down a comment and ill give it a little fix.