Goo Blender, also known as the “Goo Engine”, is a new non-photoreal toon Blender version for Windows (only)…
“our custom build of Blender that was made specifically to our team’s needs. Our team specializes in making 3D anime in Blender”
Goo Engine still seems to involve the usual head-banging wrangling of big node chains in order to get simple tooning done in the viewport.
I haven’t had time to look at the 30 minute intro tutorial and am currently uncertain if it’s real-time Eevee or Cycles rendered? Anyway, it’s available via a Patreon subscription if you want to download and try. I assume it’s a build for the latest Blender, which now has certain graphics-card requirements before it will even let you install. Note also the Goo Engine GitHub, which presumably means you can get it free if you know how to ‘build’ Blender from a code repository.
This new release reminded me to take a look at the progress of the competitor BEER, the free NPR system plugin for regular Blender. The 1.0 engine was all done, and a user-friendly UI was then being made. A magnificent effort by all concerned, and they’re to be congratulated for getting so far with it. However I see there’s been no public progress with the user UI implementation in the last year and it’s stalled at UI Milestone #2 (November 2021). Possibly they could use a volunteer UI expert, to get it finished and polished?
