Hi ctbram, my contour renders are set up real basic to be honest. I just use a mental ray physical light set up, + always go into the hypershade>Utilities and open the mia_exposure node and lower the gamma down to 1.333. I then simply assign a Blinn to the object and open the shading group of the blinn, under the mental ray tab I enable contour rendering and adjust the width and change the color. Then under the features in my render setting I enable contour rendering, set the over-sample to 30 or 60 ish for a final quality render, filter type gaussian and filter support 2.

for draw by property difference I check around poly faces, between diff instance, between diff materials, between diff labels and front vs.back face contours.

For draw by sample contrast I just set the normal contrast to 7.

Got this useful piece of knowlege of Christophe Desse as he is the man when it comes to getting toon style renders using these methods. Is deff worth fiddling with the settings as you can get some great stuff going on.

Hope this helps.

Cheers bullet just sending you a reply now bud and good luck with it all. Will help with any advice I can give you matey.