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

Toonwright gives Unity projects a complete toon look: cel lighting, ink outlines, comic halftone and pen hatching, toon water and a procedural sky. It works in the Universal Render Pipeline and the Built-in pipeline, and the same material renders the same in both. The URP side is written for Unity 6 and Render Graph from the ground up.

Nine looks in one click. Choose Classic Cel, Anime, Soft Toon, Flat Bands, Comic Halftone, Ink Hatching, Glossy Toy, Painterly or Silhouette Ink from the top of the material inspector, then adjust anything. Presets change shading, outline, rim and highlights only, so your textures and colours 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 for painting 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 that follows the light side 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. Set the width in screen pixels or world centimetres, fade it with distance, and drive it with a width map or vertex alpha. Low-poly and hard-edged models get unbroken outlines after one click: Toonwright bakes smoothed normals into the mesh on import, stored so they follow skinning. For transparent objects or a whole-frame comic look, add the screen-space edge outline: a renderer feature with a Volume override in URP, 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's 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 shadows can be softened 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 existing 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 models in them are yours to use.

Characters Demo. The monsters in the store images and 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.