Greetings All,
I'm based in Japan working in the anime industry and I'm exploring Mantra as a rendering solution for a future production. As you can guess, the toon shading reigns supreme here in Japan and it is sadly a very neglected development side of many render engines.
With that said, during my tests with Mantra I have hit a block regarding custom AOVs from the Toon Shader. Apparently, this shader does not support the export of custom AOVs through a Bind Export, at least in my case it renders just black. So, let's say, I need to get occlusion, curvature and other cool things out of this shader that are visible if I wire them in the Cf output, but they do not seem to export when sending them on their own AOV. Not even the presets from Mantra Image Planes will render when this shader is applied to the geometry, it does with a typical shader like the Principled, though… but the Toon Shader is the exeption.
Since we are on the topic, I cannot make the Toon Shader work in Karma.

Thank you in advance!

Hi. I don't see why the first set up wouldn't work. Can you post an example file?

Hi dlee
Sorry for the late reply. I'm in the middle of two productions in between holidays and typhoons.
I was making an example file for you and what I want to do works with no problems at all in procedural geometry (sphere with a mountain), but in the production model, which I cannot share, the problem happens still.
Since I cannot share that asset, I will describe it to you:
The model comes from Maya. It has several UDIMS and 32bit normal displacement maps. The file format I got from modeling is an FBX with cameras and lights. I got everything working with the Toon Shader and it looks beautiful, but for some reason, I cannot export the curvature, occlusion or any other kind of node into a separate AOV (they all render black). Cu and Oc templates in the mantra node have the same result (black on anything with a Toon Shader).

I am wondering if the geometry is the problem. Maybe you have some suggestions of things I can try?
I will ask for different file formats and I will play with some nodes and let you know if something happens.
Thanks again.

cheers!

Solved it!

The problem was in the way I was piping the displacement texture inside the shader

Before I created a parameter to plug a displacement texture from outside the shader, this got into a displacement node inside the shader to the typical chain to the end. I put the displacement texture inside the shader, straight into the Displace Output node and now everything works as it should.

Thank you