Hello!
I am currently working on a scene that uses afterburn clouds in it. What im trying to achieve is to have the clouds render with the Ink n’ Paint material. I tried many things to get this effect but i cant seem to do it probably because of my lack of knowledge. I was wondering if anyone has any info on how to achieve this effect?

I don"t’t have Afterburn on my system where I work, but I think Afterburn has a toon shader option in it. That may do what you want.

Dual Intel Xeon W5558 @3.19GHz
12GB ram/
Windows 7 Enterprise (x 64)
3ds Max Design 2012
Nvidia Qudadro 4800
Plugins: fumefx, Afterburn
Max user since Dos R3

Hello, Thank you for the reply.

I tried the toon option under the color settings. It really didn’t give me the results I was looking for. I was hoping there was a way to assign a material (the ink n paint one or final toon, to be exact) to the clouds. The standard toon option for Afterburn really doesn’t give a nice ink outline which is what I was looking for.

I will attach an image of the clouds I made with the Afterburn toon setting to show the effect. What I did was add another color layer and made it black and tightened the position up so it would just barely outline the clouds. But id prefer to get more of a hard ink outline instead of a wispy black line as shown here. And to have the fluffiness of the clouds outlined as well…

	Attachment

I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. The point of AB is that it uses it’s own shaders for volumetric effects, it doesn’t use Max’s standard shaders or those from a third party renderer.
If you wish to use such materials, then don’t use AB, create a particle system from standard or instanced geometry and apply the material you want to it.