XR Daily: Custom Cel Shading Hits Blender

Blender 5.3 Gets Customizable, Reactive Cel Shading in EEVEE

Blender’s non-photorealistic rendering story just got a lot more interesting. Artist Krysidian, working with Goo Studios to improve NPR support, has landed a set of new EEVEE nodes that let you build your own material lighting from scratch. The work is slated to ship in Blender 5.3.

The toolset centers on a Light Info node that exposes a light’s color, power, and direction, plus a Light Evaluation node for standard diffuse and specular lighting that you can still stylize. A Shadow Raycast node hands you control over shadows, including softness and position, and the Attribute node gains a new Light mode for reading custom properties off a light. Everything feeds into a Light Accumulation node that combines your results before they hit the Material Output, with separate inputs so your work lands in the right compositor passes.

Why it matters: this enables cel shading that genuinely reacts to scene lighting and supports cast shadows, instead of the flat, pre-baked toon look most Blender artists work with today. Blender 5.3 is in alpha until September 30, with the final release set for November 17, and an example file is already available for learning the new nodes.

→ 80 Level

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Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 Premieres October 20 on Netflix

CD Projekt RED and Studio Trigger dropped a new teaser for the second season of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and this time there’s a date: October 20 on Netflix. The new season is a standalone story of 10 episodes, described as “a raw story of revenge and redemption,” with a fresh cast whose paths cross across Night City.

Kai Ikarashi directs, with Kanno Ichigo as a lead character designer. Bartosz Sztybor, the Hugo Award winner behind the first season’s story, returns alongside Masahiko Otsuka. The trailer’s music, “A Rusty Dream” by the duo DOUDOU, released August 22.

The first season premiered in September 2022 and became a breakout hit for both Netflix and the Cyberpunk 2077 franchise, which recently passed 40 million copies sold. A June teaser had already introduced the new leads: Weak Kingsley, Roman Carax, Talia Yang, and D.

→ 80 Level

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Ichor Online: An Indie Action MMORPG on a Fully Open-Source Stack

Two indie developers are building an action MMORPG with no proprietary engine in sight. Ichor Online, from 3D artist Francesco Piacenti (FR3NKD) and developer LeoDev, runs on Godot, Blender, and SpacetimeDB, a real-time backend framework and database.

The pitch borrows from World of Warcraft and RuneScape but deliberately condenses them into a polished, hand-crafted world rather than a checklist of map markers. There are no quest markers, no pay-to-win, and no hidden subscription fees. Combat is skill-based, with crafting, trading, attribute building, class skill trees, randomized loot, affixes, and sockets.

It’s a useful proof point for the open-source game stack, and one to watch for anyone eyeing Godot or SpacetimeDB for a serious multiplayer project. It’s on Steam for wishlisting now.

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Payday: Aces High Hands-On: The Next Co-Op VR Shooter to Watch

UploadVR went hands-on with Fast Travel Games’ Payday: Aces High and came away impressed. The studio leaned hard into arcade mechanics: big piles of loot auto-transform into duffel bags as you pull them toward you, and those bags slow your movement, forcing you to rely on teammates to cover the escape. Gun reloading is manual but jank-free, with ammo grabbed over the shoulder.

Heists stay fresh through randomization. The bank layout stays the same, but security codes, loose loot, cameras, and even incursion options like a roof grapple hook or an exterior fuse box shift between runs. Full stealth is possible and pays a bonus, though the game director warned it’s very hard to pull off. When alarms do trip, difficulty escalates all the way to armored tactical officers.

→ UploadVR

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Demeo x DnD Battlemarked’s Next DLC, Twilight’s End, Hits September 22

Resolution Games has dated the next story campaign for Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. Twilight’s End arrives September 22 as paid DLC at $9.99, and it closes out the running arc that began with the launch campaigns, Embers of Chaos and Crown of Frost.

The campaign spans the Silver Marches, Neverwinter Wood, and Icewind Dale, with a plot about chaos threatening to “remake existence itself.” It’s the first full campaign added post-release, though Resolution has kept a steady drip of content since launch: two new characters (warlock Azruss Drevontir and druid Gruda Razortusk), a holiday side quest, a Penny Arcade Acquisitions Incorporated quest, and more one-shot dungeons.

→ UploadVR

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This Blender Plugin Turns a Real Pen Into a 3D Sculpting Tool

A Blender plugin from Reddit artist R2fA9r tracks a phone’s movement to drive a camera inside Blender, so drawing with a real pen records those movements as digital strokes. A small base station connects to a computer, VR headset, or phone and tracks any attached object with sub-millimeter accuracy.

It’s still an early prototype. The pen itself is being rebuilt into something closer to an Apple Pencil, and the developer is experimenting with ring, tracker, and pen form factors while building SDKs and plugins for other apps. Sculpting is next on the roadmap, with one tracker representing the geometry and the pen acting as the tool, followed by animation paths and possibly VR.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• Rise, a painterly Blender short film: Abcent Studios’ debut cinematic, an Arcane-style world with 2D-like VFX, made entirely in Blender. → 80 Level
• A custom motorcycle system for Unreal Engine 5: Technical artist Ihor Fridman breaks down a year of building his own bike physics after Chaos Vehicles fell short. → 80 Level
• Puzzles of the World review: UploadVR calls this cozy puzzle game a pleasant change of pace with room to grow. → UploadVR
• Pokémon sprite to stylized 3D: An artist turns a 64x64 pixel sprite into a full stylized 3D character. → 80 Level