Toon rendering with ramp shader

[eucalyptus]

I'm looking for a way to render a model like a toon
with the new ramp shader in maya 4.5
But there is no black outline as in the sample provided
by AW (in fact the help on ramp shader)
I tried another color (white for example) and it works
but I can't with Black.
Any idea?

[joojaa]

It works exactly like plunking the facing ratio into a ramp like the other toon shaders on this site, not actualy on edge recognition so you need to create a small black color band in the end of the color band.

In my honest oppinion adding the ramp shader as a new feature is just a joke! Ok its usable but instead they should have modified the ramp utility so that it shows up like this in any shader!

[mta3d]

I read somewhere that in the next version of Maya they will give all shaders attributes like the ramp shader, but take that with many grains of salt

[joojaa]

Graat, but i hope one can feed cutom atributes.... or! it would be better if it just was a dynamic node lik it is now except it just would jump in to anything you need it like it is ni the ramp shader! Its not yet realy that much more user friendly, in a way its less user friendly!

[user_deleted]

you could try render the outlines with mentl ray instead.

BTW I find ramp shader a bit slow to work in the attribute editor

[lirbank]

Saw you guys talking about Ramp. Ran into a litltle bug there today. I made a cutom attribute to an object, and then tried to make a driven key connect to the color attributes of ramp. This does not work even if you set them to Keyable (the colors).
You need a lot of patience and connect the driven key to just a random node of ramp (one that works). Then you have to manually change the connectons between them to the colors...

Hmm...

[joojaa]

one way wold be to use the drievn key drive there custom atributes (rgb= or 1 if you only nee graysacle), and then do a direct conection out of that to the value in question.

but i tried this and had absolutely no problem whan i used mel like this setDrivenKeyframe -cd nurbsSphere1.new ramp1.colorEntryList[1].color;, and all that i needed i could gt directly from the script editor with a bit of testing (if you assign the key to whatever you get the code and if you change velues for the given thing you can get the atribute to drive)