lilToon Parameters: A Reference Cross-Checked Against the Official Docs

lilToon is among the most widely used toon shaders for avatars. It is MIT licensed, and its inspector UI is localized into Korean. That makes it easy to pick up at first.

The trouble starts after that. The inspector shows the parameter names in Korean, but the documentation that explains what each of those parameters actually is exists only in Japanese. So searching for lilToon in Korean mostly turns up secondary material carried over from those Japanese docs.

Things go wrong in the carrying over. In Korean material, for instance, you run into an entry like this.

림 라이트의 벌금 (literally “the rim light’s monetary fine”) — the thinness of Rim Shade.

The name and the description do not agree with each other. Going back to the source settles it. The actual property is 「リムライトの細さ」, that is, the thinness of the rim light. 細さ means thinness or narrowness; it was rendered into English as fine(ness), and when that English word was carried across a second time it came back out in the word’s other sense — a monetary fine. The description itself was carried over correctly. Only the parameter name took that detour.

So I cross-checked the official Japanese documentation entry by entry. The baseline is lilToon 2.3.3, and the coverage extends to the range you touch most often in the inspector.

The Japanese parameter names are listed alongside so you can check against the source. Use them with the inspector language switched to Japanese, or when looking an entry up in the official docs.

Table of contents

Before you read

• Which entries you see depends on the display mode. The lilToon inspector has simple settings and advanced settings. Some of the entries below appear only in the advanced settings.
• They also depend on the render pipeline. Entries marked [Built-in RP] or [HDRP] appear only under that pipeline.
• Some entries are not in the docs at all. There are entries present in the inspector that the official documentation never describes. Those cases are flagged separately below.

Basic settings (基本設定)

The first things you decide — the broad framing of how the material renders.

Cull Mode and Render Queue are not shader-specific features; they map directly onto the rasterizer and output-merger stages of the graphics pipeline. That is also why overlapping semi-transparent surfaces are order-dependent.

Rendering mode list

Lighting and brightness settings (ライティング設定)

The docs recommend leaving these at their defaults. The baseline is the state right after pressing “Normal” under “Apply preset”; this is the area you touch only when you deliberately depart from it for photography or video work.

This lighting portion is published separately as a CC0 library called OpenLit. You can use it when you are writing your own shader and want the brightness to match lilToon.

Color settings (色設定)

Main color / transparency (メインカラー / 透過)

The base color. If the rendering mode is cutout or transparent, the alpha channel of the texture or of the color picker is used as opacity.

How this interacts with VRChat safety. The color of the texture you assign here is preserved when safety kicks in, but colors edited through color correction are not. If you have edited them, baking to a texture is the safer route.

The docs describe the final output color like this: the shader performs no special color processing, so the texture’s own color comes through as-is, and the only thing it does is multiply by the light color. With a white light you get the texture as it is; with a dark orange light you get the texture multiplied by that color.

Main color 2nd / 3rd (メインカラー2nd・3rd)

Layers placed on top of the main color. Use them for decals, fine surface detail, hair gradients and so on. You can also convert a GIF to animate them, or fade them out by distance.

Turning on decal mode adds further entries: mirror mode, copy mode, X and Y position and size, frame count and FPS. They are there for flipping through a sprite sheet as an animation.

Alpha mask (アルファマスク)

A black-and-white mask that sets opacity. The docs recommend avoiding it where possible. Putting the same information into the main texture’s alpha channel keeps everything in a single texture, whereas using an alpha mask means sampling a second texture, which raises the shader’s cost. It is a feature kept around for compatibility.

The alpha mask is ignored when safety kicks in.

Shadow settings (影設定)

The part that most shapes the impression lilToon gives. Blur at 0 gives anime-style shading; raising it moves toward an illustrated look, and raising it further toward a realistic one. Shadows can be set in up to three levels, so lightening the innermost shadow color can even read as bounced light.

The docs also spell out how the shadow color is computed. Seeing how the parameters interlock makes it easier to grasp than just moving values around.

影色 = (影色テクスチャがあれば影色テクスチャ、なければメインカラー)
       * カラーピッカーの影色
       * lerp(1.0, メインカラー, コントラスト);

最終的な影色 = lerp(影色, メインカラー, 環境光 * 影色への環境光影響度);

The shadow color is (the shadow color texture if there is one, otherwise the main color) × the shadow color from the color picker × lerp(1.0, main color, contrast), and the final shadow color is that value lerped toward the main color by the ambient influence.

The three shadow levels are combined in this order.

影色2・3の合成結果 = lerp(影色3, 影色2, 3影のライティング);
全影の合成結果     = lerp(影色2・3の合成結果, 影色1, 2影のライティング);
最終結果           = lerp(全影の合成結果, メインカラー, 1影のライティング);

They are mixed from the innermost (3) outward to (1), and blended with the main color last.

RimShade

It adds shadow along the model’s silhouette to give a sense of volume. As the docs put it, this is a rim light acting as a shadow, and the effect reads as 3DCG rather than illustrated.

That last entry is the one from the opening. It is “thinness”, not “a fine”, and it adjusts Fresnel contrast.

Emission settings (発光設定)

For things that emit light of their own, like LEDs and lamps. The specified color is added regardless of light strength, so it shows up especially well in dark spaces.

Normal map and gloss settings (ノーマルマップ・光沢設定)

Normal map (ノーマルマップ設定)

A normal map changes nothing on its own. All it does is affect how shadows, rim light and the rest get applied. Up to two can be used, so the usual split is the first for broad shading and the second for detail. Only the second one supports a mask.

The docs list what a normal map affects: shadows, backlight, gloss, MatCap, rim light, glitter, AudioLink, refraction and gem.

Backlight (逆光ライト)

The light shining in from behind that illustration uses so often. It can receive shadows and follow the light, so the light enters a little differently than with rim light.

Gloss (光沢設定)

Covers everything from illustration-style highlights to realistic reflection of ambient light. You can assign a cubemap to customize the reflected light.

MatCap (マットキャップ設定)

A MatCap moves with the camera direction. You draw the texture as highlights painted onto a sphere, and since it does not change with the lighting environment it is easy to work with.

Rim light (リムライト設定)

The look of light wrapping around the form. A highlight along the outline lifts the character off the background.

Glitter (ラメ設定)

Creates a sparkling texture.

Advanced settings — Outline (輪郭線設定)

The feature that corresponds to line art. Thickness can be driven by a texture, which gives you tapered stroke ends and partial masking, and pulling the color from a texture gives you colored line art.

There is one point the docs draw attention to. Models whose normals have been adjusted for face shading, and hard-edged models, normally do not produce a smooth outline; lilToon stores normal information in the vertex colors so it can draw one smoothly.

Between the word “push out” (押し出す) in that last entry and the design of using vertex normals for thickness, it looks like expansion along the normal direction — but the docs never state the rendering method explicitly. What is certain stops at the two sentences above.

Things that snag when you read the docs

Problems in the source itself, found while cross-checking. Verified on 2026-08-26.

For reference, every lilToon docs page has the same two sections: 概要 (overview) and パラメーター (parameters). Every property description lives in the パラメーター one, so below I link the page and name the property in the subheading.

Min・Max — the name and the description disagree

影設定

AO Mapを Mix ～Maxの範囲で再マッピングします。

The entry is named Min・Max but the description says Mix～Max. Min is what the value actually means, so the description looks like the typo.

Atras — the spelling changes mid-sentence

ラメ設定

形状のマスクテクスチャが Atras 化されている場合の縦横の アトラス 数の設定です。

The same sentence uses Roman Atras first and katakana アトラス second. It clearly means a texture atlas, so Atras is the typo. The entry name itself is Atras, so that is what shows up in the inspector too.

コントラスト（後処理） — it refers to an entry that isn’t there

ラメ設定

後処理で適用されるコントラストです。 前述のコントラスト は一定以下の明るさをカットするのに対し、こちらはガンマ値を調整することで密度を制御します。

It points at “the contrast mentioned earlier”, but that page has no standalone コントラスト entry. The list runs from UV Mode to コントラスト（後処理）, 21 entries, and it is not among them.

The cubemap in gloss settings — in the overview, not in the parameters

光沢設定

Cubemapを指定することで 反射光をカスタマイズできるため様々な使い方ができます。

That is what the overview (概要) promises, but the parameter list (パラメーター) on the same page holds only eight entries — 滑らかさ 金属度 反射率 色 光沢のタイプ 複数ライトから光沢を生成 環境光の反射 合成モード — with no description of the entry that takes the cubemap.

So the official docs are not complete either. Running into an entry that is in the inspector but not in the docs is normal; when that happens, moving the value yourself is the faster route.

Summary

• lilToon’s inspector is localized into Korean, but the official docs are Japanese only. That is where the mistranslations in Korean secondary material come from.
• One of them is “the rim light’s fine”. The original is 「リムライトの細さ」 — “thinness”, the control for Fresnel contrast.
• When an entry name is confusing, looking it up in the official docs by its Japanese name is the fastest route. That is why the Japanese names are listed here alongside.
• Rather than memorizing parameters, reading through the structure the docs do spell out — the shadow calculation formulas, for instance — helps more when you are adjusting values.

References

• lilToon official documentation (Japanese)
• 基本設定 · ライティング設定
• 影設定 · RimShade
• リムライト設定 · マットキャップ設定
• 輪郭線設定
• lilxyzw/lilToon — GitHub (MIT)

The material this post started from is 릴툰 쉐이더의 수치와 기능에 대해 알아보자! (“Let’s look into the values and features of the lilToon shader”). I used it as a reference for which entries to cover; the descriptions were written by cross-checking the official Japanese documentation entry by entry.