by sharktacos·Rendering
Images © sharktacos. Used for product review; image policy.
Brushed Shading stands out in the superhive library for tackling a specific NPR problem: keeping hand-painted brush strokes from swimming across animated characters, using a Pref-style toggle that Blender does not currently provide natively.
Brushed Shading is a suite of shaders and tools for creating painterly stylized looks in Blender, working in both EEVEE and Cycles. It uses a custom shader that changes regular smooth shading into brush stroke shading by bending the object normals through a hand-painted brush strokes map, emulating how an artist shades transitions from light to dark by painting strokes onto a canvas. It now works in Maya as well.
A material asset library ships with examples such as watercolor, oil paint, pastel, palette knife, and pencil sketch, and you can build your own custom brushes. The library also includes the shader nodes needed to assemble a Brushed Shading material node network, including Principled Toon, Brushed Normals, Triplanar Pref, and Color Correct.
Pipeline add-ons extend the workflow for animation production: Asset Shader Transfer moves shader bindings between assets with parallel object hierarchies, and Texture Reference Pose adds a modifier for selected meshes. A Triplanar Projection node with a Pref toggle lets brush strokes follow an animated character. It has primarily been designed for Cycles as a viable workflow for studio animation production.
Brushed Shading is best for artists creating painterly, non-photorealistic stylized looks in Blender, including studio animation production workflows in Cycles.
Brushed Shading is completely free to download and use.
Brushed Shading works in both EEVEE and Cycles, and it now works in Maya as well. It has primarily been designed to work in Cycles so that it would be a viable workflow for studio animation production. That focus reflects how NPR stylized rendering often finalizes much of its look in the comp, with the render split into components, the approach used at studios such as Sony and Fortiche. Across EEVEE and Cycles projects alike, the suite turns regular smooth shading into hand-painted brush stroke shading through its custom shader nodes.
Brushed Shading addresses the problem of brush strokes appearing to swim across animated characters. Because the strokes are kept independent of an object's UVs using Triplanar or box projections, animated meshes would otherwise slide through them. Renderers like Arnold and Renderman use Pref attributes to make Triplanar maps stick to characters, but Blender does not have this currently. To fix it, Brushed Shading includes a Create Texture Reference add-on function and a Triplanar Projection node with a Pref toggle, letting the brush strokes follow an animated character.
Brushed Shading is listed as free here in the catalog. For current licensing terms and any conditions of use, check the developer's page, since details can change over time. The suite includes its shaders, a material asset library with several example looks, the shader nodes for building a Brushed Shading material node network, and pipeline add-ons such as Asset Shader Transfer and Texture Reference Pose that extend the workflow for animation production.
Brushed Shading's material asset library ships with several example looks, including watercolor, oil paint, pastel, palette knife, and pencil sketch. Because the effect works with hand-painted brush strokes, a wide range of artistic looks is possible, and you can make your own custom brushes to develop a personal style. The library also includes the components needed to build a Brushed Shading material node network, with nodes such as Principled Toon, Brushed Normals, Triplanar Pref, and Color Correct detailed in the linked documentation.
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