EEVEE NPR Prototype - Feedback

[Wyatt_Hall]

As a QOL it would be really nice to globally turn off all NPR rendering.

[Patting_Pawz]

The NPR Prototype (Blender 4.4) Stable ver has a shadow problem. It was not present in Beta or Alpha version:

Edit: NVM, as it turns out, the issue was my GPU, needed to update.

[jack_rock]

Hopefully everyone agrees to add the repeat zone to node shaders

[snowtenkey]

hey uh it should be possible to see the AOVs of a different material/object through an npr tree not connected to said material right? i seem to be having trouble with this at the current build, it’s like one AOV gets overwritten by the others and so it looks like it’s blank. i’m not sure how to demonstrate this but i’ll try posting pictures later

[snowtenkey]

i’m still confused cuz based on the demo picture for the npr refraction node in the first post in this thread, this should work

edit:
it actually overwrites it based on these angles i took
i’m confused because the demo post said that it only happens with refraction, here i’m using principled bsdf. what’s happening here?

[thorn-neverwake]

@pragma37

While you can read and write AOVs from NPR nodes, you shouldn’t read and write to the same AOV (even from different NPR materials) since the results may vary randomly.

Note the above regarding AOV, and make sure you aren’t doing that.

[pragma37]

Hi! The NPR branch now has all the 4.4.1 fixes:

Blender Builds - blender.org

@jack_rock

Hopefully everyone agrees to add the repeat zone to node shaders

Yes, we actually considered adding this for 4.4, but there were some concerns about the Iterations count being a node socket value instead of a (ui-only) node property.

A fixed iteration count is probably ok for most material use-cases, but for NPR filters it would have been a severe limitation, especially since we wanted to ship the built-in NPR filters as node group assets.

So we decided to leave the feature out of the main branch for now.

@snowtenkey

hey uh it should be possible to see the AOVs of a different material/object through an npr tree not connected to said material right?

It should be possible, assuming that:

• The reader material has a Refraction BSDF and Raytraced Transmission enabled in the Material settings.
• Raytracing is enabled in the Render settings.
• The material reading the AOV is not writing to that same AOV.

This is the example image file, hope it helps:

npr-examples-4.blend

[pragma37]

@snowtenkey

i’m confused because the demo post said that it only happens with refraction, here i’m using principled bsdf. what’s happening here?

You’re sampling the AOV at an offset.
You can always read the top-most AOV regardless of the reading material settings.

Try replacing the noise offset with uniform vector values ((-1,0), (1,0)…), that should make it easier to understand.

[slowk1d]

Hey @pragma37 a couple of months ago I reported these 2 bugs of the NPR branch.

Output sockets texts are greyed out

When first adding an NPR tree, the npr input-output noodle is red

The greyed out sockets seems to be gone, but the red noodle is still present.
Nothing serious obviously, just wanted to let you know.
Thanks for continuing to work on this gem!

[jack_rock]

EEVEE-side features? What/Where is this. Also you’re saying it won’t be added in any prototype builds, but will it be officially added in the 5.0 Merge?

[snowtenkey]

i missed the fact that it needs to be refraction bsdf; thanks!

now i’m able to put face features in front of hair even without depth offset

[mmm]

https://projects.blender.org/pragma37/npr-tracker/issues/24

Can u check this bug?I’ve been report this a few times, it’s still not been fixed in the latest version.

[mmm]

The first instance lifetime is always black,

[Axis4s]

Trying to bake volume probes results in crashing

Trying to bake volume probes results in crashing

[Patting_Pawz]

Is there a 4.3 version of this protoype? I would like that very much

[jack_rock]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49zq_NbMUQE Created an entire POM system in NPR!
Performance was good till I had to add in the PDO which could be easily fixed by adding a depth offset node I think.
Also there are a few limitations because of having to hack in PDO. Since I’m displacing the floor downwards it’s basically a ray portal where it captures all the objects near it. And that portal’d rock doesn’t follow the same texture lighting that the real rock uses so I have to manually tweak that duplicated rocks textures and shading to fix.
Before

After

So I end up disabling cast shadows in the nodes and and disabling the rocks Raytraced Transmission: it can no longer contain raytraced bounce lighting which is a drawback. Not sure if theres a fix for having raytracing AND transmission but transmission has to be on for the setup to work and be able to read data through objects. And HDRI’s and world lighting will also ruin the PDO hack effect since its changing the lighting again. Again a real solution to PDO like a depth node or pixel depth offset controllers would solve all of this.

So in summary 2 main issues

• Raytracing Transmission has to be off for transmission of the floor and passing of data through objects to work. Downside is object can’t recieve raytracing/bounce lighting
• PDO hack has many drawbacks which can be solved with implementation of certain nodes.

The whole ground NPR Setup:

edit: updated the cast shadows-normal was messed up and fixed some stepping gradients.

[jack_rock]

Don’t think so. Blender Builds has the earliest build set to 4.4.0 alpha