High heels, cute face, all the boys, they want a taste~
Backlace π is a pretty anime (also called "toon", "cel shaded", or "npr") shader for Unity and VRChat. Backlace is packed with a wide range of features- from anime character shading, to screen-space rim lighting, to procedural glitter. Get started with a single click for a typical fully-lit anime character or dive deep into the advanced settings like Pathing and Liquid Layers! (ββΏβΏβ)β‘
Notice!! It is best to download from Releases or on another platform like Gumroad, because the Github Repo has many in-development settings on (ex. limited/no UI). The latest release is 3.0.0.
| Caption | Preview |
|---|---|
| Thumbnail |  |
| Styles #1 |  |
| Styles #2 |  |
| Styles #3 |  |
| Styles #4 |  |
| Creative Effects |  |
| Diagram View |  |
| Stickers |  |
| Substances |  |
| Materials |  |
| Liquids |  |
- Main Settings:
- Rendering Presets/Control, VRChat Fallback, GI/GPU Instancing
- Albedo, Normal (Supplied Map/Albedo Derived), Alpha Controls
- Texture Stitching, Texture Post-Processing, Legacy Mode (for older hardware)
- UV Effects (Triplanar, Screen, Spritesheet/Flipbook, Flow), UV Manipulation, Vertex Manipulation, 4 Assignable UV Sets
- Anime Shading: PBR, Ramp (Texutre/Procedural), Cel (Harsh/Default/Soft), NPR, Packed (Genshin/UmaMusume/GuiltyGear), TriBand, Skin, Wrapped
- Lighting: Extensive Control, Multiple Lighting Models, Manual Controls, Light Limiting, Attenuation Control, and Emission
- Character Settings: Ambient Gradient, Manual Normals, SDF Shadows, Stocking, Eye Parallax, Translucent Hair, Expression Map, Face Map, Gradient, Toon Highlights, Angel Rings (Hair), Quick Materials (Latex/Fabric/Silk/Rubber)
- Specular: Standard/Anisotropic, Vertex Specular, Energy Control
- Stylise: Rim Lighting (Fresnel/Depth/Normal), Clearcoat, Matcap, Parallax Mapping (UV/Layered/Interior), Subsurface Scattering, Detail Mapping, Shadow Mapping
- Stickers: Two Sticker Slots, UV/Triplanar/Screen Mapping, Hue Shift, Distortion, Glitch
- Effects: Dissolve (Noise/Directional/Voxel), Texture Pathing, Glitter, Distance Fading, Iridescence, Shadow Textures, Flatten Model, World Aligned Textures, VRChat Mirror Detection, Touch Interactions, Dithering, Low-Precision (PS1), Vertex Distortion (Distortion/Glitch), Refraction, Screen Space Reflections, Liquid Layer (Sweat/Blood/Oil/Icing/Slime/Wax/Mud)
- World Building: Stochastic Tiling (Triangle Grid/Contrast Aware), Splatter Mapping (Standard/Projection), Texture Bombing (Jittered/Layered)
- Outline: Outline/Silhouette Mode, Colour/Texture, Vertex Colour Masking
- Third-Party Integrations: LTCGI, Super Plug Shader, AudioLink
- Variant Splitting: Backlace is divided into multiple shaders so that you only need the performance cost of the features you need! You will find Small, Default, and Full versions of the shader alongside different features such as Grabpass or Outline.
- Fair Keyword Usage: Alongside variant splitting, some more expensive features are gated behind local shader features, so they won't ever touch performance if you aren't using them!
- Fully Documented: on my website at https://luka.moe/docs/backlace ~
- Custom UI: Pretty to look at, a search bar, custom settings, 9 languages, easily reset tabs and keep track of activated features.
- Generate Compact Shaders: Automatically make new shader files that strip any unused keywords from even being seen by the compiler.
- Preset System: Use built-in presets or make your own! Presets won't mess-up your main settings like the albedo texture, so you can experiment with different looks without losing your base material setup.
This section will be updated when I make things with it! If you make something with Backlace ~ whether a game or shader ~ please let me know so I can add it here! β‘οΌΎβ½οΌΎβ‘
- The official distribution of Backlace itself! You can find it on Gumroad, Jinxxy, Booth.pm, and Payhip (and on this repo).
Backlace is licensed under Backlace License 2.0: for content creators (games, avatars, renders, videos, etc.) it grants permission to use personally or commercially without additional restrictions; for derivative shaders it adds restrictions (no near-identical resale and attribution). The software is provided βas is.β See LICENSE.md for full terms.
Backlace supports any platform that uses the Unity Built-in Render Pipeline (BiRP). These include your own game made with BiRP, or content in other games such as VRChat, Beatsaber, and MateEngine. Any BepinEx plugins targetting BiRP that load custom shaders can also use Backlace.
Backlace was built with Unity 2022 LTS (but compatible with 2019.4+)
If you wish to make your own shader with Backlace, please see Contributing to Backlace for more information! This is unnecessary if you just want to use Backlace as-is in your projects (ex. game developers, avatar creators, or world builders). ( *οΈΎβ½οΈΎ)
- This shader was originally a fork of the Toony Standard Rebuild shader by VRLabs, which is under the MIT license. However, essentially all of that code has been replaced, removed, or rewritten. No bugs for Backlace should be reported to them.
- Various lighting modes are derived from other projects, specifically Poiyomi Toon, lilToon/OpenLit, and Mochies Unity Shaders. Thesse are all under the MIT license and code references are limited to lighting modes with those names (ex. "Poi Custom", "OpenLit", "Mochies").
- The "Flatten Model" effect is inspired directly by Lyuma's Waifu2D Shader, which is under the MIT license. Please note Backlace's implementation is simplified and their code is better if a flat model is purely the goal of your project!
- Original inspiration for the Raymarched SSR feature came from orel1's SSR module, which is an implementation of Mochie's fork of ERROR.mdl's SSR. Both are under MIT licenses. While Backlace's idea stemmed from there, the implementation here is much simpler and modified.
- UmaShader, Arc Systems Work for Unity, StarRailNPRShader and HoyoToon were referenced for what packed texture channels contain for their respective models and shading techniques (ex. stockings, shadow pushing) used in the games for a few settings. All are under the GPLv3 license.
- AudioLink features, and a lot of the boilerplate code in
Backlace_AudioLink.cginc, are from AudioLink, which is under a modified MIT license. - Third-party features such as LTCGI and Super Plug Shader are unassociated projects, under their own licenses, and require separate installation.
- Default textures (ex. ramps and noises) are from a variety of sources online, notably Perlin Noise Maker, OpenGameArt, and Booth Matcap Pack 2.
- The name is inspired by a certain vulgar and promiscious angel. (ｑβ₯βΏβ₯ｑ)