Blender Anime/Toon Shaders [Teach me Senpai] (Patreon)

Hey Creative Gearheads!

This is a HUGE find and it's thanks to Arthifax, one of your fellow supporters and up and coming creatives!  We've had some interesting discussions about the industry and different content creation techniques.  Today he shared a link for this great $2 eevee toon shader which lead to the idea for this larger toon shader study. 

There are several different youtube videos on building anime shaders in Blender (I'll link them too) and since they are Eevee based I haven't fully gone through them in the past, but with the new eeVR method (with settings shared in depth in my VR Rendering Guide; but basically you use overscan and disable the eevee post processing effects) I've been getting back into those methods. 

Cycles is by far the easiest way to render VR content across the board, including other programs and game engines.  However PBR (Cycles default) is not the ideal way to view anime characters, it's basically too much lighting information.  Eevee allows all that to be scaled back because of the way it deals with lighting (for a more complex answer google it lol, though it doesn't make much difference).

That said the best way to do an anime style is in Eevee with a custom toon shader.  It looks closer to the original style, characters really pop and it can help hide flaws in the models topology which you see a lot in mmd models and head swapped characters.  I've been researching toon shaders off and on for at least a year, so these are the resources old and new that I've found the most valuable. 

Get the Eevee Genshin Impact Style Shader HERE for $2

Get the Open source BEER Toon Shader HERE (free)

Get the VR Toon Shader HERE ($15)
[Anime Style by JPN Creator Khafji, not specifically for virtual reality, HQ anime models available with free preview versions]

Get the Lightning Boy Shader 2.0 HERE ($30)
*Creator lso has free Toon Facial Rig and Ghibli style Tree/Cloud on Gumroad

Youtube Toon Shader Resources

[Basics] Blender Toon Shader
[Basics] Making a Toon Shader 

Lighting Boy Custom Toon Shader for cartoon characters
---Manual Shader Creation Playlist---
[Part 1 Light Sources] [Part 2 Dynamic Outlines] [Part 3 Metallic]
[Part 4 Hair] [Part 5 Shadows] [Part 6 Rim Lights]
*includes links to Before and After Blend File
Full Character Creation Guide

Genshin 3D shading explained
Genshin Impact - Shading in Blender (Texture and Shaders SOLVED)
Genshin Impact Models in Blender
MMD Genshin IMpact Shader Tutorial 

BEER - FREE & Open-Source NPR for Blender 

Guilty Gear Style Shader by 3DCinetv [p1] [p2] [p3] [p4] [Full Playlist w/ extras]
Extended Video Content [$10/part] *p4 $21 and comes with model and shader