Back in June, we featured Krysidian's stylized shading system, which works across both engines and reacts dynamically to light color. The artist is back with an update, highlighting the progress made on the NPR prototype, an ongoing collaboration with Goo Studios aimed at improving NPR support in Blender. The results are reportedly set to make their debut in Blender 5.3: we're getting several new nodes for EEVEE that let users implement custom material lighting.

According to the PR, the new Light Info node provides details such as the light's color, power, and direction, allowing you to create your own shading. Light Evaluation handles standard diffuse and specular lighting while still letting you stylize the result. Shadow Raycast provides control over shadows, including their softness and position. The Attribute node also gets a new Light mode, which lets you access custom properties from the light. Finally, Light Accumulation combines the custom lighting results before sending them to the Material Output, with separate inputs that make the results available to their corresponding compositor passes.

Read more here. If you want to test these features, get a Blender 5.3 build by clicking here, and download an example file to learn the basics of the new nodes. 

Blender 5.3 is currently in the Alpha stage, which is expected to continue until September 30. The final release is scheduled for November 17.

In the past, Krysidian has published a really great free and highly customizable rig of Hornet from Hollow Knight. Brad Faucheux recently turned it into a fantastic animation:

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