New Blender NPR

Dedicated to Non-Photorealistic and Expressive Rendering

BEER Update December 2016

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The site is running normally, despite of the lack of new content. Your donations are still for BEER development. Here is the current situation: the upgrade of Blender 2.8 viewport is underway, therefore BEER cannot be coded while the core of Blender is in the process of redesign. We will unfortunately have to wait for maybe until the end of 2017 to see how to move forward.

We started the BEER design in 2014 and would like to reinforce how BEER will be different with the following write up:

There are 2 types of material systems:

  • Mixer like Blender Render and Cycles
  • Maker like what is proposed for BEER

Mixer material systems have strict rules and shaders can only be combined in limited ways. We see these limitations in almost all render engines. We dislike the setup.

Maker material system is a lot more flexible, but we need to make it easy to use. Flexible enough that you can code new shaders (or steal borrow from shader websites). Easy enough that you can snap shaders together like Lego bricks. To fulfill these requirements, we would opt for a different UI and UX than current Blender Render/Cycles.

You can program a block of shaders, that can be stacked in layers which is combined with different blending algorithms. These blending algorithm are not limited to those available in blending mix node. It is wider than that. It can be any algorithm that can work with any blender data. There will be predefined common blocks like Lambert, Phong etc, for faster material making, and they are familiar.

Then there are those custom blocks that we will add as we discover their usefulness and will be properly documented. If there are demands for pixel perfect pixel art shaders, that will be added to BEER. If you need a custom anti-aliasing algorithm, that too will be added as demand arise. BEER will not be a stagnant renderer like the current Blender Render engine.

Essentially we have the same goal as in 2014 and will be the same in 2017 and onward.

PS: BEER can do photoreal rendering if you want it. 😉