Fantasy Nights - NPR Shader

Description:

The Fantasy Nights shader is inspired by Blind Guardian's album covers as well as by Bakshi's Lord of the Rings visual style. As the name suggests it was conceived to represent fairytale night landscapes and allows both a more realistic shade and a dramatic and gloomy one.

The shader consists of a set of eight nodes (two for light managing, three for the materials and three for added effects). In order to guarantee maximum freedom of lighting control for individual objects, the shader was developed mainly using vectors. This means that the two nodes that manage the lights, called Localized Light and Delocalized Light, can potentially manage two specific lights for each object present in the scene. The Localized Light simulates the behavior of a point type light (i.e. illuminates surrounding objects and has a falloff) while the Delocalized Light simulates a sun type light. The materials obtainable through the Main Material node need these two lights as input. The Transmission and Emission nodes doesn't. To manage the lights, controllers have been created which coordinates must be entered in the nodes via drivers. The DL Controller acts as a light source while the Delocalized one has two parts; rotating the DL Light around the Controller you get the light direction.

DELOCALIZED & LOCALIZED LIGHT Here must be entered, by drivers, the coordinates of the "controller objects" for the two types of light. Animation Fluidity allows, at high values, to generate jerky light movements.

MAIN MATERIAL The first three inputs are essential for correct functioning and require a Delocalized Light node and a Localized one. We have two sliders to control the amount of the respective lights, color controls and the falloff, in Blender units, of the Localized Light. In addition to the base color, there are controls for roughness, subsurface scattering and velvet. The subsurface scattering is simulated with a hue shift and, therefore, with a white base color it is set by default so as to offer a snow-like result (at value 0.4). In addition to the specular we also have the controls of the highlights. For both types, Soft and Hard, we have control of the amount and sharpness; Highlights Intensity is a generic control for both and adjust the extension on the surface. NOTE: the highlights are disabled by the Velvet. The last three nodes allow a more contrasted lighting style, potentially close to a sort of cel shading, which allows, in extreme cases at maximum Extension values, to incorporate the object in the shade.

TRANSMISSION Here there is little to say; self-explanatory XD

EMISSION The Burnt Material and Burnt Spread values allow you to add a burn effect to the object.

GLARE Adds a glow that surrounds objects. It is directly inspired by Blind Guardian's covers and intended as limited use on main characters or magical objects. It is possible to limit the effect to the direction of the Delocalized Light (as it would be a sort of moon/solar reflection) through the appropriate slider. There is also a combined texture.

CANVAS NOISE This effect is inspired by Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings and offers a "canvas effect" in the screenspace.

CANVAS NOISE BACKGROUND This version of the Canvas Noise apply the effect to the world background.

NOTE: as for normal use of Eevee, the Transmission material requires the enabling, in the Render Panel, of Screen Space Reflections and Refractions; the Specular value of the Main Material does not work with Refraction enabled. NOTE: if the hatching has an incorrect size try to scale the mesh differently than the object that contains it.