Huge congrats! Very well deserved.
It's great to see a project taking its own path on so many different levels succeeding like this.

And thanks for the Blender shout-out.
🫶

If that's not the issue, note that bug reports are still welcome even if this is an experimental branch.

We have a dedicated tracker for it:
projects.blender.org/pragma37/npr...

The Report a Bug button from the NPR build should point you there.

About the crashing file.
At some point I renamed the Light Loop zone to For Each Light, and that broke previous files that used it.

If the file is from before Novermber 14, you should be able to open it with a previous build, delete the zone start/end nodes, and open the file on a new build.

Thank you for making the video and sharing the files. 🙂

Not being able to access the original light color is quite stupid, TBH. We upload the color*power together to the GPU, but I'll see if there's space to split it.

If you have any other feedback feel free to share it on the devtalk thread.

🧵 Cool stuff made with the Blender NPR Prototype Branch:

(Reply to this post with your own stuff!)

🧵 Cool stuff made with the Blender NPR Prototype Branch:

(Reply to this post with your own stuff!)

For Each Light

Node Zones support has been added to Material nodes.
In addition to a Repeat zone (like the one in Geo-Nodes), we have a new For Each Light zone.
This allows creating custom shading that works consistently with arbitrary light types and colors.

Multi-layer Refraction

Refraction layers allow chaining multiple refractions for a “mesh-based” compositing workflow.

AOV Input

Similar to the NPR Input and the NPR Refraction, the AOV Input lets your sample AOV images.
Here we can read the AOV from the behind layer because the Refraction Material doesn’t write to the AOV (otherwise it would overwrite the Suzzane AOV).

Image Sample

These nodes output image sockets, so you can sample them with an offset and make your own filters.

In fact, the filters that come with the branch (Curvature, Cavity, Edge Detection...) are just regular node group assets, so you can tweak them to fit your artistic vision!

NPR Refraction

The NPR Refraction is similar to the NPR Input, but it reads the layer behind a refraction material.

NPR Input

You can think of this as an extension of the ShaderToRGB workflow.

NPR Tree

We have a new NPR node tree where these features are being added. NPR trees use the same nodes as Materials, except:

- New NPR-only nodes are available.
- BSDF nodes can’t be used here.

We have gone over several design iterations since then, and in the end we decided to build an experimental prototype branch to gather user feedback before committing to a final design.

You can find the full info in devtalk, (devtalk.blender.org/t/eevee-npr-...), but these are the main new features:

This project has been a long time in the making.
I wrote the first (discarded) proposal over 3 years ago!
gist.github.com/pragma37/997...