Toon + Outline Mtl Playground!

[Naxos]

Just a quick note, to see if we are on the same page - the directionality for the Corona Light was to give hard shadows from a very large light that was intending to be like an "ambient" light to fill the scene in general. You can get hard banding and hard shadows from a e.g. a sphere light simply by making it very small (and because intensity is measured in light emitted per surface area, increasing the intensity significantly). It's only if you want something large where you have to get into high directionalities for Corona lights.

Though it is just easier in general to use the non-physically realistic Max lights in that case since those actually have zero dimensions and are true point lights :) That's the thing about a Toon result, you don't really want physically realistic lighting in it anyway. You can see that even very small, there is still some slight softening in some edges from a Corona light - which could be beneficial, or not, depending.

Attaching a version of the scene with small Corona light in it, but still, easier and faster to render to use the Max lights, where you also have the option to have shadows or not.

Many thanks, Tom, now it makes sense ;-)

[TomG]

You're welcome! Glad it helped :)

[pokoy]

FWIW, here's a reddit post about an OSL hafltone shader in development (for Arnold) that I just stumbled upon, with some great examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Maya/comments/1ltgj7y/spent_the_last_4_weeks_creating_a_halftone_osl/

I believe for this to work you need to access the renderer's internals, meaning something like this will (most likely) not work in OSL in Max.

[JoachimArt]

Those are some seriously cool example of OSL halftune usage.
I think it the corona toon will first let you control ambience color, (meaning no forced ambience) and then also support OSL halftone, it could become an awesome toon render.