Hey everyone!
There’s a new blog post detailing the post-prototype direction of NPR in Blender:
I’ll try to provide a brief explanation for those familiar with the prototype features:
Some of the features from the NPR Tree will be moved to regular material nodes:
- Custom Shading (For Each Light zones or something similar).
- Basic filtering. Limited to geometric values, like Position or Normal (so no Combined Color, Diffuse/Specular or AOVs inputs), but things like edge detection, curvature/cavity, custom AO, bevel… will be doable within the material nodes themselves.
Per-material filtering will be kept as a separate node tree, but it will use compositing nodes instead of material nodes.
Here you will have access to shading results (Combined Color, Diffuse/Specular, AOVs…) and geometric values (Position, Normal…), but won’t have access to a For Each Light zone equivalent.
In addition, you will also be able to (optionally) draw outside the object shape, chain multiple filters, and use a per-object tree.
The main advantages of this approach are easier Cycles compatibility, and getting all the compositor features from the start.
The main disadvantages are that the render engines won’t be able to “see” the compositing-based filtering results (so they won’t be reflected/refracted), and that we limit the ability to use filtering as input for custom shading.
We also have a new thread for the blog post, so feel free to leave your feedback and questions there: