We have been hush hush about BEER (Blender Extended Expressive Renderer) development. Now we are proud to present to all NPR enthusiasts the first BEER development update.

The development task has been in the hands of Alice Lawrie AKA @beesDotMoe

The development is defined by milestone as listed on this Trello board.

You can find the BEER project repository here.

For this development release, we have completed milestone 1 and milestone 2. The list of features done is as follows:

• BEER layers – using malt materials
• BEER materials – compile layers into a single material and malt shader
• BEER panel – can create new beer materials and create and manage its layers
• Mask support – can use any prior layer as input
• Solo and mute layers
• Input layers – can use either the base mesh info or any prior layer as input for the layer itself
• Blend modes – 12 blend modes implemented, mirroring most common blend modes in graphics software

Dependencies

Installation of the BlenderBeer addon for Blender currently requires prior installation of:

1. BlenderMalt
2. Pygments as a module for Blender. Future releases will have a stripped down version of Pygments included.

Installation

• Create a user script folder if you don’t have one already: Blender > Preferences > File Paths > Scripts
• Install BlenderMalt
• Extract Pygments, put the pygments subfolder to your scripts\modules\ folder.
• Extract BlenderBeer to your scripts\addons\ folder.

Instructions

After installation, switch the render-engine to Malt. A new panel will be accessible in the 3D view window. New Beer materials can be created in the new panel. New Beer layers can be created and linked to new or preexisting Malt materials. To compile layers into a single Malt material, make sure that all Malt materials compile without errors, and click the Update BEER Material button.

Current Limitations

Beer materials will not automatically compile when layers are moved or changed. The “Update BEER Material” must be used to update the Beer material and the linked Malt material. The Beer material uniforms can only be updated in realtime using the Malt panel. To propogate layer properties to the main material, the “Update BEER Material” button must currently be used. Automatic linking of the two will be available in the next update.

Reminder

This is still a work in progress but we are open to improvement suggestions. A lot of features are in the works and can appear incomplete. If you find any glaring errors please report them here.