VRayToon suggestions

[Bruce Allen]

Dear V-Ray Team

Inspired by that awesome talk Dreamworks TV Animation gave at SIGGRAPH V-Ray Days, I'm playing with the toon shader.

Here are a couple of things I noted:

1. There is no way to render VRayToon lines as a render element along with beauty (without lines) in one pass. EG:
- normal beauty and other render elements (without toon lines)
- render element of toon lines only (ideally this would be RGBA so we could have different colored toon lines with alpha... but even black on white would be a start!)
Looks like the Max folks requested this too - https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...te-render-pass

2. When I tried to make separate passes for beauty without lines and lines, VRayToon is tough to make work with Maya 2017 Update 4 Render Setup (on 3.52.03, will test Beta tonight)
- Absolute Overrides to VRayToon properties like Enabled or Line Color don't work, so I can't set up passes easily. A lot of this is due to Render Setup being a a little over-complicated, but maybe you guys can do something on your end.

3. The VRayToon node doesn't appear in Outliner by default until you show non-DAG objects. It seems inconsistent that stuff like VRayDisplacement shows up as a DAG object, but VRayToon does not.
This seems small but it might confuse junior artists! Actually, I wish you could have a separate Outliner category for all those V-Ray "utility nodes" - VRayDisplacement, VRayToon, etc - and we could hide / show em.

Bruce Allen
Senior Theatrical Designer & TD - mOcean

[yolov]

Hi Bruce,

1. V-Ray 3.6 for Maya now comes with a Toon render element that will contain the toon lines in a separate pass (it's also in 3ds max too).
2. It should be working well with 3.6 and the render setup layers for setting overrides (as long as the toon object itself is added to a collection) - at least it does here on our end as we haven't found any issues with that so far. If you do find any issues, please let us know.
3. Yes, it is inconsistent with nodes like the displacement, but that's the way it's implemented. Displacement and ObjectProperties are actually sets and always contain objects, unlike the Toon node. To make it easier and avoid the need to disable the dag filter, we've added a sort of a "toon lister" to the toon icon in the VRay shelf - right click it and all toon nodes in your scene will appear in the right-click menu right there. You can select your toon node and with it selected, you can click "add" in the render setup window to add it to a render layer collection. Furthermore, the first option in that right-click menu opens a separate window with all toon nodes in the scene where you can multi-select all of them. If you don't want to use the shelf, you can run this MEL command to pop the window: vrayShelfShowNodeListerWnd "VRayToon"; We have the same options for the clipper nodes, btw.

I hope you find this information useful.