NPR Shader Kit — non-photorealistic rendering toolkit

Anime, manga, comic, watercolour, painterly — every stylised look in one addon. NPR Shader Kit applies nine stylised looks in one click — cel shading, halftone, hatching, manga screentone, watercolour, painterly, gradient map, ink wash and blueprint — plus reliable inverted-hull outlines. Built for EEVEE and EEVEE Next.

What it solves

The Blender Foundation confirmed NPR is "ready for development" but hasn't shipped a toolkit. The community workarounds are fragmented — one addon for outlines, another for toon, manual node graphs for everything else. NPR Shader Kit unifies them.

Headline features

• One-click presets. Anime, Comic, Ink/Manga, Watercolor, Painterly — each sets the style and all its parameters (and outline) in one pick.
• Live update. Turn it on and tweak parameters with the result re-applying to selected objects instantly — no Apply button round-trips.
• Cel / toon shading. Stepped diffuse bands with a configurable shadow tint and 2–8 light steps, plus optional Fresnel rim-light and a sharp specular highlight for a true anime look.
• Halftone. Dot pattern whose dot size follows the lighting — comic-book shading. Screen-space or surface-locked (UV).
• Hatching. Cross-hatch line shading driven by the same lighting value.
• Manga screentone. High-contrast black-dot screentone for manga shadow regions.
• Watercolour. A two-tone wash that follows the light with a ragged, noise-broken edge, plus Fresnel edge-darkening where pigment pools on the silhouette.
• Painterly. The lighting is posterised into a few flat values and the band edges are broken up with noise, so the shading reads as thick brush strokes of one pigment.
• Gradient map. The whole light range is remapped through an editable three-stop ramp — cool purple shadows into warm highlights — without touching the object's own colour. The staple of stylised character work.
• Ink wash. Sumi-e: two ink values with a soft threshold and a darkened silhouette, so shadow is solid brushwork rather than a dot screen.
• Blueprint. A flat technical field with light drawn edges — reads as a drawing, which is what design reviews and exploded views want.
• Outlines, done right. Inverted-hull method (solidify + flipped normals + emission backface) works in both EEVEE and Cycles. Or toggle Freestyle for render-only lines.

How it works

Each style is a real shader node group, built programmatically and inserted into your materials — so you can open it up and tweak the nodes if you want. Applying a style reads your material's existing Base Color and routes it through the style group into the Material Output. Clearing a style reconnects your original shader. Non-destructive.

Compatibility

Engine	Styles	Outlines
EEVEE / EEVEE Next	All nine (use Shader to RGB)	Inverted hull + Freestyle
Cycles	None — the styles need Shader to RGB	Inverted hull + Freestyle

All nine styles read the lit value of the surface through "Shader to RGB", an EEVEE feature — they preview in EEVEE and EEVEE Next. The outline is real geometry, so it renders in Cycles as well.

Normal maps

Since 1.2.1, whatever feeds your material's Normal input — an image-based normal map or a bump node — is carried into the style, so surface detail still reads once the shading is posterised. Nothing to set up: apply a style as usual. Keep Normal Map turns it off when you want a deliberately flat, poster-like surface.

Version-safe

Socket creation is written for both Blender 3.x and 4.x node-group APIs, and outline auto-detects EEVEE Next on 4.2+.

License

GPL-3.0. No telemetry, no online activation.