In this tutorial, Animation Mentor alum and 3D animator Myles Jackson walks through how to give a 3D shot a stylized 2D, anime inspired look directly inside Maya and Arnold. He covers both quick viewport tricks and a more robust Arnold shader and outline pipeline that you can use for shorts, demo shots, or portfolio pieces. Watch the full video above.
About Myles Jackson
Myles Jackson’s animation experience includes work in feature film, short film, episodic series, and mobile games. Credits include the anime-influenced series RWBY, both Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsmen films, and several scenes in the DC Heroes United TV series. Myles is a 2020 Alum of the Animation Mentor Character Animation Program and is experienced in Autodesk Maya, Blender, and Unity.
Why Go Beyond Maya’s Default Look
Myles opens by acknowledging that many animators are not excited about Maya’s default, more photoreal render settings when they want something graphic, cartoony, or anime influenced. He shows a before and after comparison of a standard shaded character and a final cel shaded render with clean tones and outlines to illustrate the goal.
Drawing on his work on stylized, toon shaded projects like Justice League x RWBY and DC Heroes United, Myles explains that the techniques he shares are the same ones he refined for his own short film, Ghost. The aim is to create a flexible workflow that lets you keep the 3D benefits of Maya while presenting your work with a 2D inspired finish.
Quick Viewport Toon Shading vs Arnold
To start, Myles demonstrates the fastest way to get a toon look in the Maya viewport using Maya’s built in Toon menu. He applies a Shaded Brightness Two-Tone shader to his Kayla Unlimited rig, instantly giving the model a two-color light and shadow look in the viewport.
He then adds a Toon Outline from the same menu, which wraps a black contour around the character and looks good from any camera angle. However, he points out the key limitation: both the toon shader and outline work only in the viewport and do not appear correctly in Arnold renders. For high quality output, you need an Arnold friendly solution.
Building an Arnold Toon Shader in Hypershade
Myles moves into the Hypershade and walks step by step through constructing an Arnold-compatible toon shader. He selects the existing skin material, reveals its input and output connections, and disconnects the viewport-only toon node so the character returns to default shading.
He then creates an aiToon shader (Arnold toon material) and connects it to the character’s surface shader slot. To control the light and shadow bands, he creates an aiRampRGB node and plugs its outColor into the aiToon Base Tone Map. Switching the ramp from Linear to None removes the gradient and produces crisp, hard-edged light and shadow regions, achieving a clear two-tone look when rendered in Arnold.
Controlling Color, Texture, and Shadow Strength
With the basic toon setup in place, Myles shows how to tune the look. He adjusts the aiToon base color directly for quick flat-color tests, then recommends plugging an aiImage node into the base color to use proper texture maps for the character while still benefiting from the two-tone shading.
He demonstrates how moving the ramp’s color stops changes shadow coverage, effectively increasing or decreasing the perceived light intensity. He also lightens the shadow color to avoid pure black, which can be visually harsh, and encourages artists to dial in shadow values to suit their design and readability goals.
Handling Viewport Display vs Render Look
Myles notes that Arnold toon shaders will not necessarily look “toon” in the Maya viewport, which can be frustrating when you want nice playblasts. As a small workaround, he changes the aiToon hardware color in Extra Attributes so the character’s viewport color at least approximates the intended palette, even if it lacks true two-tone shading.
He emphasizes that for final output you should judge the look in the Arnold Render View, not the viewport, and that the toon setup can be reused on any rig or asset by repeating the same node connections for each material.
Adding Arnold Contour Lines for Outlines
To get outlines that work in Arnold, Myles moves to the Render Settings under the Arnold Renderer tab and adds a Contour Filter. This filter draws line work in the render based on edges and silhouettes, producing a 2D line art feel over your toon shaded character.
He explains that these contour lines are camera dependent: the line width appears thicker as you pull the camera back and thinner as you move closer, because the lines maintain a constant screen-space size. He shows how to adjust global line width in the filter to compensate per shot so the outlines always feel consistent and intentional.
Creating Hand-Drawn Line Weight Variation
To push the outlines toward a hand-drawn aesthetic, Myles dives back into Hypershade and uses aiToon’s silhouette settings. He enables Silhouette, sets the edge color (often white for clarity in tests), and points out that the silhouette width is what the Arnold contour filter reads when drawing lines.
He then creates an aiCellNoise node and connects its outColorR channel to the aiToon Silhouette Width Scale, which modulates line thickness according to a noise pattern. By adjusting octaves, amplitude, and pattern parameters on the noise, he introduces subtle variations in line weight along the silhouette, making the outlines feel less mechanical and more like hand-inked strokes.
Extending the Look to the Whole Scene
Once the toon shading and line work are dialed in on the character’s skin material, Myles applies the same principles to every part of the rig: clothing, hair, shoes, and any visible accessories. He also sets up toon shading and contour-driven outlines for all background geometry so the environment matches the character style.
He shows a complete frame from his project where both foreground character and background share consistent two-tone shading and line work, illustrating how the unified treatment helps the entire scene read as cohesive 2D-inspired art even though it is rendered in 3D.
Rendering Passes for Compositing Control
Myles calls out an important caveat of the contour filter: it makes compositing more complex if you want to separate characters and backgrounds or adjust line color independently. To solve this, he sets up multiple AOVs in Arnold so that color and contour information are rendered as separate passes.
In his pipeline, he renders at least two EXR passes for each element: one RGBA pass for the toon shaded color and one contour pass for the outlines, using different filters (box for RGBA, contour for lines). In compositing, he combines four layers: character color, character line art, background color, and background line art. This gives him full control over line color, intensity, and blending in post without re-rendering.
Putting It All Together for Your Own Shots
By the end of the tutorial, Myles has built a repeatable workflow that takes you from default Arnold shading to a stylized 2D look with solid tones and adjustable outlines. The process centers on aiToon plus aiRampRGB for shading, Arnold’s contour filter plus aiCellNoise-modulated silhouette width for line work, and AOV-based passes for flexible compositing.
He encourages animators to apply this setup to their own Animation Mentor-style shots or short sequences, customize ramp values and line noise to fit their preferred 2D influence, and treat the look development as part of the storytelling, not just a last-minute render tweak.
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