Toon shader and contours shader for mental ray® for 3DSMax®

David Lanier 3D hereby grants to you a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to possess and to use the
following shaders for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

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Download :

Mental ray shader for 3DSMax 7+

Image realized with our shader, courtesy of Andy Alesik : www.alesik.de

Tutorial :

Set the .mi file in the directory 3dsmax7or8 \ mentalray \ shaders_autoload \ include
And the .dll in : 3dsmax7or8 \ mentalray \ shaders_autoload \ shaders

The directories are indentical for Max 7 and 8.

Set mental ray® as the default render engine.

Now open the material editor and click on Standard (left arrow) and choose a mental ray® material (right arrow).

Your material editor becomes now :

Click on the button on the right of Surface and choose dl3d_toon_shader(DL3D) like this :

You can now edit the shader's parameters :

The parameters are :

- Ka : coefficient for ambient color
- Kd : coefficient for diffuse color
- Ks : coefficient for specular color
- roughness : coefficient to set the roughness of the surface for specular reflexions (the highest is the roughness the more centered is the specular reflexion)
- ambientcol : ambient color
- diffusecol : diffuse color
- specularcol : specular color
- fractalnoise : adds fractal noise on specular and diffuse color (more like a test for fun than a must have feature).

This toon shader discretize the coefficient linked to specular and diffuse reflexions. For that purpose, it uses 3 floating numbers in the range [0, 1]
- lim1 : lowest limit (all under lilm1 has a black color)
- lim2 : medium limit
- lim3 : highest limit
- mode : integer that can be 0, 1 or 2, it is used to filter the lights used for rendering. (0 = use all ights, 1 = use only lights specified in the following array, 2 = use all lights but those mentionned in the following array)
- array : array of lights if mode is set to 1 or 2.

Then go up one level to retrieve the mental ray® material :

And click on the contour shader and select dl3dtoonshader_contour(DL3D) :

Your material editor becomes :

The parameters are :

- color : the color of the contour of 3D objects.
- width : width of the contour
- silhouette : if checked, we draw only the silhouette of the object (the contour lines that are interior to the object are not drawn)

Then, you have to setup the rendering parameters this way :

Then check the Contours enable check box.

And click on on the Contour Contrast button and choose "dl3d_contour_contrast_function(DL3D)" shader like this :

Now click on the Contour Store button and choose "dl3d_contour_store" :

The dl3d_contour_store shader has no parameters.

The dl3d_contour_contrast shader has editable parameters. To edit them, drag and drop the button dl3d_contour_contrast_function on on the slot of the material editor. Then choose instance for your modifications to be applied on the shader in the renderer options.

The dl3d_contour_contrast parameters are :

This shader is used to set which pixels are going to bedrawn as contour using the color from the dl3dtoonshader_contour(DL3D) shader.

- deltaangle : is the angle in degrees between 2 faces, if this angle is higher than deltaangle we consider this pixel as part of the contour.
- zdelta : is the delta Z into the Z buffer to consider 2 pixels as part of the contour.
- density : floating number in the range [0,1], let you set the density of the contour drawing.

Finally, assign the contour shader here :

Assign the mental ray® shader on one or several objects and render.

Videos :

vidéo dl3d_toon_shader (AVI 2,3 Mo)

Images :