Check out Blender’s experimental anime rendering builds
The Blender Foundation has released an experimental prototype of Blender specialized in Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR), produced in collaboration with 3D anime firm DillonGoo Studios.
DillonGoo Studios will continue to develop Goo Engine, its custom fork of Blender with additional NPR features, in parallel with the official NPR branch.
Goo Engine: a separate branch of Blender for stylized and anime-style rendering
Originally released publicly in 2022, Goo Engine is a custom build of Blender used in-house on DillonGoo Studios’ own online anime series.
It adds a number of NPR-specific features to the open-source 3D software, including light groups and custom shader nodes in Eevee, Blender’s real-time render engine.
On its release, DillonGoo Studios commented that its features were not being pushed to the master branch of Blender as they “may destabilize other features like Cycles”, Blender’s production renderer.
New features now being released via an experimental NPR prototype branch of Blender
Those features now come a step closer to the main build of Blender through a new experimental NPR prototype branch of the software.
It has actually been available since September, but got a lot more exposure this week through the video above, posted on the Professor Goo YouTube channel.
In it, DillonGoo Studios founder Dillon Gu announces that the studio is “officially joining the Blender Development team in building stylized rendering into Blender”.
Gu comments that the collaboration will lead to a “Renaissance in stylized rendering”.
Goo Engine lead developer Lateasusual (Chris Clyne) will be working with Blender Eevee and viewport module developer Miguel Pozo on new features.
(One of the first results of the collaboration is already available, since DillonGoo Studios worked on light linking in Eevee, one of the key features of Blender 4.3, the most recent stable release.)
Updates to Goo Engine continuing, although it’s currently still based on Blender 4.1
As well as the official NPR prototype branch, DillonGoo Studios will continue to develop Goo Engine.
It remains based on Blender 4.1, the last release of the software to include the legacy version of Eevee, an updated version of the renderer, ‘Eevee Next’, having rolled out in Blender 4.2.
In the announcement video, Gu says that a version based on Blender 4.2 was “difficult to get working right now”.
Gu also announced that DillonGoo Studios will be working on an open movie using the NPR features it develops, along the lines of the official open movies created by the Blender Studio.
As with Goo Engine itself, the will be funded “primarily” through the DillonGoo Studios Patreon.
Release date and system requirements
The NPR prototype of Blender is currently available to download for Windows, Linux and macOS as an experimental branch build.
The current release is based on Blender 4.4, although the NPR features are unlikely to be part of the stable release of Blender 4.4, currently scheduled for March 2025.
In the announcement video, Dillon Gu commented that it was difficult to give a timescale for integration into the master branch of Blender, but that it “could be two years”.
Download the experimental NPR prototype of Blender from the Branch Builds webpage
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