Fixed: Shadow Softness, Rim Softness and Shadow Strength no longer appear usable when Set all colours and numeric values automatically is off. All three are written to the material as shader numbers, and that switch controls whether those numbers are written. With it off, the sliders changed nothing: even when Shadow Strength was lowered to zero, the material kept the full-depth shadow colour on both lilToon and Poiyomi. The three sliders now grey out and explain why while the switch is off.
Fixed: the generated skin normal looked like a grid of square tiles instead of soft skin. The entire noise field was squeezed into each of the 8×8 phase cells used for repeating woven patterns, and the tile copied its first row and column to the opposite edges. As a result, the 50×50 shader repeat drew the doubled line fifty times. Noise now fills the tile in one continuous pass, and the tile wraps at its own edges.
Fixed: the skin normal now has a natural skin grain instead of two sizes of soft lump. It uses four octaves of gradient noise rather than the two octaves of value noise it used before. Value noise places detail on a square lattice, so the old surface looked blocky at every setting. There is still no pore layer: the normal only breaks up a shadow border that would otherwise look plastic, and pores look undesirable close up. Tilt peaks at about 27 degrees and averages 9 degrees, before the material's own bump scale of 0.15 damps it.
Fixed: Texture Kit thumbnails on the Surface tab were always blank. A preview image was generated for each row, then discarded instead of being passed to the row.
Fixed: Texture Kit no longer offers a Periods per tile slider for Skin. Periods break up repeating woven patterns, but skin grain does not repeat, so the slider had no effect.
Fixed: materials named "Bodysuit" or "Headphones" are no longer detected as Skin, and "Furniture" is no longer detected as Fur. Name hints matched anywhere in a name, so any word containing "body", "head" or "fur" was enough. A hint must now match a whole word; plurals still match.
Fixed: the Rim Lighting 1 blend-fix button said it would switch to Multiply but actually set Add. A rim layer with both an incorrect style and an incorrect blend mode also reported two issues, even though only the style issue could be addressed first.
Fixed: an apply that fails partway through no longer prevents you from using Revert on that material.
Applying, previewing and dragging sliders are much faster on heavy shaders. Each number written used to trigger three reads of the shader's full property list, and lilToon declares over 500 properties. The list is now read once per shader and cached. Applying to a target also used to analyse each material one to three more times than necessary.
Fixed: faintly tinted materials no longer get sky-blue shadows. Anything below a generous chroma threshold was treated as colourless and given a fixed blue hue, turning warm white hair (#F7F5F1) into a cold blue shadow. Such materials now retain their own hue; the same hair resolves to #D4C7B7. Only materials with no hue at all, such as pure white or pure grey, fall back to the stable hue, and the transition between the two is gradual rather than abrupt.
Removed the heading above the shadow and rim sliders. Each slider already has a name, so the heading added nothing and took up a row. The border and spacing already define the section. The explanation moved to the section tooltip.
Added space above and below the shadow and rim slider strip, and below its heading. It now aligns with the cards below instead of sitting indented against the tab bar.
Fixed: the shadow and rim sliders moved from above the tab bar to the top of the Colour tab. They control shadow settings, so placing them on the Surface tab beside the Shadow Mask and Texture Kit was inappropriate and wasted vertical space. They remain the first controls on the Colour tab, with no section to open.
Shadow Softness, Rim Softness and Shadow Strength moved out of the Shading section into their own strip, fixed below the material row. They remain visible on either tab at any scroll position, so adjusting these three values while looking at the avatar no longer requires opening a section and scrolling past controls you never use. The strip also shows the distinction: these three values are remembered per project; the rest are session-only.
Every material in the target list now renders the same shadow colour. Previously, each target derived its own palette from its base colour, creating a visible seam in parts split across several materials. The last colour you picked is now the shared reference for the whole list. Each material receives the shader value that produces that colour.
A target whose colour is too dark to match the shared shadow now falls back to a shadow derived from its own colour instead of losing its shadow entirely. The status line shows how many targets fell back.
Fixed: a colour set manually in the palette now reaches every material in the list. Previously, the list recalculated its colours and discarded the edit.
Fixed: clicking a material already in the target list now updates it instead of being ignored. Previously, re-picking a different spot on the same material and pressing Apply All still wrote the first pick.
Target rows show each material's sampled colour beside the shadow colour it will receive.
Shadow Softness, Rim Softness and Shadow Strength are now three sliders in the shared settings at the top of the window, remembered per project. Set them once, and every subsequent material starts with those values.
Rim Softness now has its own control. It used to follow the Shadow Softness slider, so you could not soften the rim band without also changing the shadow.
Shadow Strength is now adjustable. It used to be fixed at full opacity, a stronger setting than most shipped avatars use. The reference avatars use 0.23 and 0.50, and there was no way to lower it.
Fixed: toggling Use Advanced Shading or changing Shading Style no longer scrolls the window to the top. Rebuilding the window preserves the scroll position and open sections.
Defaults are unchanged. A project that leaves the new sliders untouched renders exactly as it did in 1.7.2.