.

Principled Toon (Cycles)

Combines the Toon BSDF for both glossy and diffuse into the familiar structure of Blender’s Principled BSDF, or more properly, into the structure of an OpenPBR material. Includes controls for stylized metal and glass.

Note that because Blender’s Toon BSDF only works with Cycles, the same is true for the Principled Toon. If you wish to render in EEVEE you can connect the other shader node components into any material.

Inputs / Parameters

Base Weight

Scalar multiplier for Base Color

Base Color

Overall color of the material used for diffuse, metal and transmission.

Base Flatten

Controls how smooth or sharp the diffuse shading is. Works by coupling the size and smooth controls of a toon BSDF together into a single slider, where the smooth is the inverse of the size. Intended to emulate the flattening parameter in the Moonray toon shader.

Metalness

A mix between dielectric shading and toon metallic. Uses two lobes of Glossy Toon BSDF for the reflections to get a stylized metallic look. When enabled, Specular Size controls the specular dot (which takes its color from the Specular Color), whereas the Specular Roughness controls the overall material roughness of the metal’s tinted reflections.

Toon Spec

Toggle between toon specular (Toon Glossy BSDF), and microfacet GGX specular.

Specular Size

Gives an angle of reflection between 0° and 45°.

Specular Weight

Scalar multiplier for Specular Color.

Specular Color

Color tint for specular highlight.

Specular Roughness

Specifies the roughness of the surface for specular reflection. When Toon Spec is enabled, this controls the toon glossy smoothness. That is, it specifies an angle over which a smooth transition from full to no reflection happens.

IOR

Index of refraction for the GGX spec. Defaults to a physically implausible value of 2.0, since we are doing non-physically based rendering (NPR), producing a broader specular highlight.

Normal

Controls the normals of the base layers.

Spec Normal Strength

Controls the amount that the specular is affected by the normal.

Emission Weight

Scalar multiplier for Emission Color.

Emission Color

Light emission from the surface.

Alpha

Controls the opacity of the surface. Usually linked to the Alpha output of an Image Texture node.

Transmission Weight

Enables stylized glass, which is a mix between refraction at glancing angles and transparency. This allows for stylized glass where indirect reflections and global illumination are disabled for NPR lighting. That is, where the max light bounce is set to zero for diffuse and glossy.

With both diffuse and glossy rays at zero (0) the glass will appear darkened. Enabling diffuse rays removes the darkening. Enabling glossy rays produces lighter glass.

Transmission IOR

Index of refraction for transmission.

Example material node network