Bill, I thought I read a post of yours somewhere where you said your goal was trying to get things as photorealistic as possible.  I guess I'm mistaken.  Anyways you are right about it taking work.  I spent an hour or so fiddling around with the toon shader earlier this year only to realize it was going to take a lot more than a few hours if I'm learning by trial and error.   

I really like what vestmann did with toon and your VSS.  It's not prefect but it's better than anything I've done... with the right texture map, you could probably get something very close to borderlands with that.  Your vargas mathmatic shaders look interesting.  One of the things about stylized is it can mean many different things from mario to picasso so unless you are specific about you want, you can get anything. 

WARK!

Thus Spoketh Winterclaw: a blog about a Winterclaw who speaks from time to time.

 

(using Poser Pro 2014 SR3, on 64 bit Win 7, poser units are inches.)