ParaNormal: A Fully Light-Driven Toon Shader

ParaNormal Toon Shader is the first procedural normal painting shader, an innovative NPR shading solution that provides a fully light-driven workflow in both EEVEE and Cycles (including GPU rendering).

Full support for the real lighting in your scene eliminates manual adjustments to materials, using a familiar PBR-like workflow to make your toon renders stand out with subtle gradients, light color, detailed shadows, and dramatic lighting inspired by digitally colored comic books and anime.

Features Overview

• Light intensity & falloff, light color, indirect lighting, and shadows from any light source.
• Create any toon material by adjusting diffuse, specular, metal, emission, and more.
• Halftones, soft shading, and more advanced features to customize the look.
  
• Modular nodes to customize the shaders or build your own unique style.
• Hit the ground running with a familiar PBR-like workflow and convenient Asset Library integration.
• Render with both EEVEE and Cycles (including GPU rendering).

✨ Illuminate Your Creativity with Unparalleled Lighting

Say goodbye to dull, flat lighting! Achieve stunning visuals inspired by your favorite digitally colored comics and anime with lighting features previously unseen in cel shading.

With support for true colored lighting—no more faking it with “virtual lights”—plus light intensity, light falloff, indirect lighting, and shadows from any type of light, ParaNormal brings your scenes to life.

🎨 Creating Materials is a Breeze

Between diffuse, specular, metallic, transparency, and emission properties, you have everything you need to make any toon material.

Getting started is simple: Drag and drop a base material from your Asset Browser into your scene, assign a key light, then tweak the color and other properties to achieve your desired look. Whether you need a matte material like stone or skin, or something shiny like steel or glass, you can configure the shader with just a few clicks.

Try bringing in your own hand-painted textures to achieve truly stunning visuals!

🌈 Customize Your Artistic Vision

ParaNormal is designed to be flexible and versatile. It includes nodes designed to work like simple building blocks that can easily be chained together to achieve a custom look, as well as a library of modular nodes for advanced users. Let your creativity flow and achieve the art style you envision.

🌟 Choose Your Render Engine

Both EEVEE and Cycles provide incredible rendering capabilities. EEVEE offers blazing-fast rendering and ample flexibility for art direction. Cycles delivers more advanced lighting features, ideal for achieving moody, dramatic lighting with clean shadows. Choose the one that best suits your project’s needs and style.

Compatibility: Cycles for Blender 3.6 and up, and EEVEE for Blender 3.6-4.1. Rendering with EEVEE "Next" on Blender 4.2 and up works, but requires denoising with a separate post-processing tool for the best results.

🚀 Revolutionary Approach

ParaNormal Toon Shader uses procedural normal painting relative to a key light to provide a dynamic visual style that combines the look of 2D with advanced PBR-like lighting. Experience subtle gradients, detailed shadows, and captivating lighting in your creations.

This revolutionary approach introduced by ParaNormal is similar to the manual normal painting techniques that have since been popularized by Cody Gindy and Alan Wyatt's BrushFlow, but in the form of a shader that is fully automatic, does not require manual editing of your normal maps, and is optimized for a toon-shaded look.

Say goodbye to the limitations of emission shaders, Shader to RGB, and OSL. Unlike other toon shaders, ParaNormal doesn’t require setting brightness in materials and works with both EEVEE and Cycles.

🆕 Updates

v0.6.0 – Reflections & other improvements!

• NEW: Add Reflection node. Easily add real reflections, ideal for ballroom floors, mirrors, water, etc.
• NEW: Polar Coordinates node. Create circular patterns and kaleidoscopic effects.
• Numerous minor improvements, including more control over shadow intensity.
  

v0.5.0 – Soft shading, Blender 4 support, and more!
v0.4.0 – The Ink Update: Halftones, outlines, and a ton of other new nodes & enhancements!
v0.3.0 – New utility node & several minor improvements.
v0.2.0 – First update released: New shader, new materials, and more!
v0.1.0 – Initial release!

📦 What’s in the Box?

• 8 total shaders: ParaNormal Curve Shader, ParaNormal Flat Shader, ParaNormal Triplanar Shader, and ParaNormal Uber Shader, plus utility & reference shaders including Basic RGB Toon Shader, Separate Worlds Shader, Unlit Shader, and Vector Visualization Shader.
• 7 material presets: Base Matte, Base Semi-Gloss, Base Gloss, Base Metal, Base Glass, ParaNOIRmal, and Line Art (Inverted Hull).
• 37 modular shader nodes for customization or building your own shader variants.
• Full User Guide and 27 demo scenes to make using these assets a breeze.
• Updates & customer support are included for free.

Compatibility: Cycles for Blender 3.6 and up, and EEVEE for Blender 3.6-4.1. EEVEE "Next" on Blender 4.2 and up works, but requires denoising with a separate post-processing tool for the best results.

Promotional Images: Any assets shown that are not listed above are intended for example purposes only, and are not included. Line art is added with standard techniques. Some assets are used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

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