Blender Extended Expressive Renderer

Blender Extended Expressive Renderer (BEER) is a free and open source realtime non-photoreal (NPR) rendering engine with Malt as the backend. The main feature of BEER is the ability to extend the rendering capability from the ease of adding custom shaders to a customizable shader graph.

BEER will have a layer stack UI (like in raster painting software). There will be a list of shaders provided by Malt's shader library.

There will be 3 interfaces to create and to assemble shaders for BEER:

1. GLSL Code via Malt
2. Malt nodes (Code like node tree)
3. Layer stack (BEER UI)

Advanced users will be able create custom rendering pipelines optimize for their production.

Development update will be posted at: https://blendernpr.org/beer/

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 to your scripts\modules\ folder. (Note: Only the pygments subfolder of the git directory should be placed in scripts\modules\. )
• 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.