Toon Style Textures/Materials

[richard_cousins]

I’ve just finished well almost finished modelling a character for my final uni project. I’m looking for a decent texture/shader.

Basically I want to achieve this effect as shown below(these are from the 3dtotal gallery), if any of the creaters or anyone with knowledge on this read this could you enlighten me on how you achieve such nice renders/materials:

Now the elephant character is what I’ve modelled and I’m basically looking to achieve the style that I have shown you in the following pictures.

Does anyone have any advice on what the best rendering engine to use is, either max's default, mental ray or vray as I’m know them fairly well.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on forums about using ink and paint shaders will fall off maps but can’t see to get the desired effect. I’m also trying to acquire as I’m typing this demos for final render/toon and Brazil render and I’ve head they have good toon shaders built in. Really if I can achieve this effect without a third party shader it will be more beneficial to my learning of max.

Could anyone point me in the right direct or tell me a combination of materials that would work for this effect. As the models are simple but it’s the lighting/materials and rendering that gives them that high quality finish which is what I want to achieve, as this has plagued my work for a long time(textures/materials are my weakness). From what I’m seeing with a lot work of this kind is they either use vray or mental ray but after that there is no information on how this is achieved and after many attempts I’m no closer to figuring it out.

I want to know how this is achieved so I can learn this instead of relying on sites with pre built shaders.

So please any help would be much appreciated. All your help will help me with my ongoing 3D learning.