Following the recent release of Blender 3.6 a special anime focused fork of Blender, Goo Engine, was also updated. Goo Engine is the in-house custom version of Blender used by Dillon Goo Studios, an art studio that specializes in anime productions. They have made a number of modifications to Blender to better serve anime artists.
Goo Engine is described as:
Goo Engine is our custom build of Blender that was made specifically to our team’s needs. Our team specializes in making 3D anime in blender, and we have made our custom build available for others to do the same.
This fork of Blender is also free and open source although if you prefer not to build it yourself, you can get precompiled binaries by supporting them on Patreon. If you wish to build Goo Engine from source the process is fairly simple, assuming you have a working Make based C++ environment configured (Visual Studio 2022 with Make installed should be sufficient). To build Goo Engine from source you simply:
git clone https://github.com/dillongoostudios/goo-engine.git cd goo-engine make update make
Given the fact this is a C++ project though, do not be surprised if things go wrong. In my case I got an error that the most recent version of Visual C++ codegen is not compatible and to downgrade to an earlier version. Instead of doing this, I simply removed the lines from the cmake file giving the error and things worked well enough… your mileage may vary!
Key Links
Sample Toon Shader Used in Video
Speaking of the video, it is available here, and will showcase Goo Engine in action and the basics on how to use it to create Anime/NPR renders.