Toon Shader: Toonwright | Cel Shading, Outlines, Water, URP & Built-in

Toonwright contains 3 shaders (Toonwright/Toon, Toonwright/Water and Toonwright/Sky) plus 2 hidden screen-outline shaders, 9 style presets, 12 C# scripts, 3 demo scenes and 3 rigged demo models with prefabs.

It is a complete toon look for Unity 6.6 and newer: cel lighting, ink outlines, comic halftone and pen hatching, toon water and a procedural sky. One material works in the Universal Render Pipeline and in the Built-in pipeline, and the URP side is written for Unity 6 and Render Graph from the ground up. Convert the materials you already have in one step, pick a look, and keep your textures.

Nine looks in one click. Choose Classic Cel, Anime, Soft Toon, Flat Bands, Comic Halftone, Ink Hatching, Glossy Toy, Painterly or Silhouette Ink at the top of the material inspector, then adjust anything. Presets set shading, outline, rim and highlights; your textures and base colour stay as they are.

Every toon feature in one material. Toonwright/Toon has two-tone or banded shading (1 to 8 bands) or a ramp texture you can bake from a gradient in the inspector, a deep shade for a second shadow tone, and a shade mask texture that fixes where shadows always fall. On top of that: halftone dots or pen hatching in the shade transition, toon highlights and anisotropic strand highlights for hair, rim light on the lit or the shadow side, matcap, emission with UV scroll and pulse, wind sway, dissolve with a glowing edge, and a dithered fade as the camera gets close. Opaque, alpha clip and four transparent blend modes are included.

Outlines that stay put. In URP, hull outlines are drawn by the Toonwright renderer feature in their own Render Graph pass, so depth priming cannot erase them; in the Built-in pipeline they are a pass of the shader itself. Hull outlines draw on opaque and alpha-clipped materials. Set the width in screen pixels or world centimetres, fade it with distance, and drive it with a width map or vertex alpha. For unbroken outlines on hard-edged and low-poly models, select the model and run Tools > Toonwright > Bake Smoothed Normals For Selection (Toonwright bakes smoothed normals into UV channel 3 on import, stored so they follow skinning), then set the material's Outline Direction to Smoothed Normals. For a whole-frame comic look, add the screen-space edge outline: it inks the depth and normal edges of every opaque and alpha-clipped object, whatever its material, as a renderer feature with a Volume override in URP or a camera component in the Built-in pipeline.

Toon water and a procedural sky. Toonwright/Water has depth-banded shallow and deep colours, shore foam, crest foam, open-water foam lines, a stepped sun glint, refraction and vertex waves. Toonwright/Sky is a gradient skybox with a sun that follows your main light, banded toon clouds, a sunset tint and stars after dark. The Toonwright Wind component drives foliage sway and wave direction together.

Every rendering path. The Built-in pipeline, and URP Forward, Forward+, Deferred and Deferred+; in URP, Toonwright/Toon renders forward-only, like URP's own Complex Lit. Point and spot lights get a hard toon falloff, received shadow strength is set per material, and in URP the shaders are SRP Batcher compatible.

Easy to adopt. In URP projects, Toonwright offers on import to add its renderer feature to every URP renderer. Built-in projects need no setup. Convert URP Lit, Simple Lit, Complex Lit, Baked Lit, Unlit and Built-in Standard materials in one step, keeping base map, colour, normal map, emission, alpha clipping, transparency and render face.

See it working. Three demo scenes are included: a toon island with water, sky and wind, a gallery of all nine presets, and a feature gallery. The wolf, horse and cowboy in them are yours to use; they are rigged and import without animation clips.

Characters Demo. The monsters in two screenshots and in the video are from Dungeon Horde, our pack of ten stylized rigged fantasy monsters, sold separately on the Asset Store. They are not included in this package.

Key Features:

- Toonwright/Toon: two-tone, banded (1 to 8) or ramp-texture shading, deep shade, shade mask

- 9 style presets: Classic Cel, Anime, Soft Toon, Flat Bands, Comic Halftone, Ink Hatching, Glossy Toy, Painterly, Silhouette Ink

- Halftone and pen-hatching shade patterns, anchored to the object

- Toon and anisotropic strand highlights, rim light, matcap, emission with scroll and pulse

- Wind sway, dissolve with a glowing edge, camera-proximity fade, four transparent blend modes

- Hull outlines (in URP their own Render Graph pass, safe with depth priming); pixel or world width, distance fade, width maps

- Smoothed-normal bake for unbroken outlines on low-poly and skinned models (one menu command, then Outline Direction: Smoothed Normals)

- Optional screen-space edge outline (URP renderer feature with a Volume override, or a Built-in camera component)

- Toonwright/Water: depth bands, shore, crest and line foam, glint, refraction, vertex waves

- Toonwright/Sky: gradient sky, sun that follows your light, toon clouds, stars

- Built-in pipeline and URP Forward, Forward+, Deferred and Deferred+; SRP Batcher compatible in URP

- One-click project setup, material converter, gradient ramp baker, 3 demo scenes

More from Backrock Studios:

- Dungeon Horde - 10 Stylized Rigged Fantasy Monsters with PBR and LODs: the characters in the screenshots

- Low Poly Japanese Village

- Low Poly People Pack: 10 rigged and animated characters

- Holo UI: Sci-Fi GUI Kit

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