Hey all!

Happy new year!! May GOD bless you in all you lay your hands to for HIS Name's sake!!

I have to say that 2017 certainly came with a lot of unexpected things. I was hoping to finish Exodus by June (haha, hilarious! haha). I was certainly not planning on working on toon shaders for Eevee and honestly, by this time I was expecting a finished Eevee (can someone say super unrealistic, hahaha).

On the plus side - the animation for Exodus has progressed to where chapter 7 is visually complete. While it's sound still needs work, I am immensely pleased with the result so far. It does feel kinda artsy in a way, but I think that's just because of the way dialogue is handled in scripture. I really love it so far! Chapter 8 has it's frog modeled, but I am yet to animate it. There seems to be a few issues with the model that need refining, but like everything else will get done in due course. You can find out more about the Exodus 7-12 KJV project here:

and here:

Now the main topic of this post is not about new year's resolutions or things like that, it's more about something unexpected GOD passed onto me this year.

I am in a group on Facebook that focuses on NPR (Non-Photoreal Rendering). This covers anything that is not aiming for realism. Think of graphic novels, anime, looney tunes, comic strips, doodles, pixel art, etc. You name it - predominantly though, the focus tends to come down to anime. It's like it's the highest form of NPR there is - getting that translation from traditional to digital right (retaining visual language while letting 3D be 3D). It's an extremely difficult style to translate successfully to 3D, because it is so imperfectly perfect in it's visual language and execution.

Using toon shading is of course my preferred method for many reasons, but primarily they all somehow come down to:

 - Render speed

 - Stylistically extremely powerful

This post is about both in one - Eevee.

Eevee is Blender's new viewport engine and it's replacement of Blender Render. Blender Render has been the first engine. It has been so "hacked to death" in a way that means fixing it will literally be a re-writing of the entire engine in C++ or everything else you add onto it, will also have to be hacked into it. Because of the way it works and the understaking it would be, the best option was to just write something from scratch and do it using the current industry trend PBR (Physically Based Rendering) - this, you will kindly notice, is totally in our favor, because NPR requires less than PBR to render (in anime and similar cases).

Eevee is still very much in its infancy and still has such a workload to get done that some targets have been delayed in order to get it stable and released so that people can start integrating it. Similar to Cycles' release (though I don't recall features being backlogged for a release).

NPR and PBR are in a way very contrary to one another, because NPR breaks the PBR rules, while also embracing them when needed for stylistic effect. You could say NPR is a total physical law bender for the sake of expression. When you want NPR in a PBR engine, it is not an easy feat and with Wasili Novratidis attending the 2017 Blender Conference, we got some news about the work for NPR in Eevee.

Wasili is also from the Netherlands and loves creating anime style art - just like many, including myself, in the NPR group. However, he did bring us the basic news that while Ton luvs NPR and wants it in Blender, the current trend and requirements are for PBR and that means it gets priority. This does not mean NPR can't be included - it just means that they don't currently have the manpower to build it as well. Not being one to just give up, he contacted me and he kinda dragged me, haha, into the endeavor of getting some NPR tools made for Eevee and wow did we work hard.

Wasili sent me the math and setup the first basic node setups and made some really pivotal systems and focused on learning the coding side, while I focused on building on those tools. Like he said - he laid the foundation and I built the building. Neither of us could've gotten this done without GOD and each other. It was and still is predominantly a task that is way above our heads, but we're doing our best to do something and that's where great things usually start, by starting and not giving in.

To help not overwhelm you with overly huge posts, I am really being led to split this development process up into smaller bites, so it's easier to take in.

To finish today's post, I'm just going to tell you what we currently have and where you can get it.

We have four shaders currently available:

 - Blinn - point lamp

 - Blinn - sun lamp

 - Phong - point lamp

 - Phong - sun lamp

Blinn and Phong here refer to the math behind the specularity (that shiny part that always changes on things as you move or as the object rotates, etc.). Yeah, this involves some heavy  (imo) math to get done right. Don't let anyone tell you math is stupid and impractal. It is a lie! Everything around you, including the phone in your hand operates by mathematical principles laid down by GOD when HE created everything. Everything created (at least that I can think of) has order and structure that can be quantified mathematically from movement to function - these include things like gravity, flight, the laws of thermodynamics, hard and soft body physics, fluids (newtonian and non), etc.

That order GOD has laid down for us, give us the ability to make things like computers, Blender and of course Eevee and anything inside it, such as shaders.

These shaders, working within an existing shader, work based on the kind of lamp their calculations are based on. Usually, this would be done within a single shader and it will respond to light sources accordingly, but we're talking nodes here, not coding, so not an option (as far as I currently know).

That means, if your scene requires a toon material based on the Blinn model and you need a point lamp (like an indoor scene), then you'd pick the point lamp shader. If you have a sun lamp setup (like outside), you would pick the sun lamp shader. It's really that simple.

You can find the downloads on the Toon Shaders page.

In the next post, we'll get to talking about how these two specularity models differ and why most people tend to prefer the Blinn model.

Biggest thanx to GOD for helping me with this. Without HIM, none of this would be possible! :D

Know JESUS yet?

Have a great one!!!

Thank YOU!!!!!!