Blender 3 and the NPR future

I wanted to share this article because it is important to note 3 particular things that are in the horizon for the Blender 3 release:

1) Shader to RGB will change, and we will get a new evaluation method for shading flat materials (and I don't want to get my bets high, but I will think we will get something similar to what we've been seeing in the Guilty Gear Stylized Shader series, where it is necessary to treat a pbr shader (limiting glossiness and intensity) like a physical "flat" material only converting the light color.
The new Blender 3 will do this to be fully integrated in the advancement of doing Real time in EEVEE.

2) Grease Pencil support. Finally!! Depth of field will pick up grease pencil's transparency, shadows and more, realistically integrated. Thus, Grease Pencil materials will not be a datablock of their own; that is to say "drivers and custom parameters will work on the same evaluation datablock for shaders as Blender does with the current physical evaluation of the light bounces". In plain English: Compatible materials, compatible effects integrated in GP and passes

3) With all materials unified, now we would correctly isolate individual elements "linked" to a light. This is something I've seen on an alternative Blender 2.83 branch for the past year, and I know it is possible to illuminate (i.e: the eyes) separated from other meshes. Place a point light near the pupil for an NPR character and have it affect it ONLY the pupil, not the eyebrows or the face... instant stylized highlights.

More features …

There is a huge list of features that are just waiting for this  cleaner code base. That includes Grease Pencil support, vertex  displacement, panoramic camera support, faster shader compilation, light  linking… etc.

Let me know what you think could be the most useful implementation to Blender 3?

-Pierre