Malt

Malt is a fully customizable real-time rendering framework for animation and illustration. It's aimed at advanced users and technical artists who want more control over their workflow and/or their art style, with special care put into the needs of stylized non photorealistic rendering.

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Features

• Free and Open Source. MIT License.
• Real Time Rendering.
• 100% customizable Python Render Pipelines.
• Complete Blender integration.
• Code as a First Class Citizen
  • Automatic reloading.
  • VSCode integration, including GLSL autocompletion.
  • Automatic UI for Shader and Pipeline parameters.
• Built-in Pipeline for Stylized Non Photorealistic Rendering.

Current State

Malt development began on June 2020 and it's still in beta state. It's quite complete feature wise, but still unstable and backwards compatibility is not yet warranteed.

Malt is software agnostic, but Blender is the only integration planned right now.

Requirements

• OpenGL 4.1 support.
• Latest Blender release.

A dedicated Nvidia or AMD graphics card is highly recomended.

While Malt itself works on Mac, the built-in render pipeline does not due to limits in the Mac OpenGL drivers.

On Linux distributions not based on Ubuntu, you may have to compile and package BlenderMalt yourself. See How to setup BlenderMalt for Development for instructions.

Install

• Go to the latest Release page.
• Download the BlenderMalt version that matches your OS and the Shader Examples.
• Open Blender. Go to Preferences > Addons, click on the Install... button and select BlenderMalt.zip from your downloads. (It will take a few seconds)
• Tick the box in the BlenderMalt panel to enable it.

Altenatively, you can download the Development version to test the latest features. Keep in mind this version is only intended for testing and your scenes may break often.

Uninstall

• Untick the box in Preferences > Addons > BlenderMalt to disable the addon.
• Restart Blender.
• Go back to Preferences > Addons > BlenderMalt, expand the panel and click the Remove button.

First steps

• Go to Scene Settings and change the renderer to Malt.
• Create a Sunlight and add a new Object with a new Material.
• Inside the Material settings set the Shader Source to one of the files from the Shader Examples.

Malt allows to use different settings for Viewport Preview, Viewport Render and F12 Render.
By default, the Viewport Preview should be faster than the Viewport Render mode.

To learn how to make your own materials in Malt, take a look at the From Nodes To Code tutorial.

Bug Reports

If you find a bug you can open a new issue.

For bug reports include:

• The Log file from the Blender session where the bug happened. You can find it in Preferences > Addons > BlenderMalt > Open Session Log or search for it in your system temporary folder.
• A .blend file and a list of steps to reproduce the error.

Developer Documentation

How to setup BlenderMalt for Development.

Developer documentation is best viewed directly in Github, most folders in the source code have relevant documentation.
The Malt folder documentation is a good starting point.