I want this thread to be a celebration of stylized graphics, where we can share our work and processes to inspire and teach others! I’d love for you to share images of your projects, and links to things you found helpful. I’ll be continuously updating this post with what I’ve been working on and I look forward to seeing your projects!
WATER
Practice with Depth Fade and RGB Channel Masking. Full tutorial here.
After sitting and watching an AGDQ Speedrun of Wind Waker, I was inspired to try making my own version by animating Noise. Full tutorial here.
CEL SHADING
After running into issues with a Cel Shading Post-Processing effect not working with translucent materials, I explored a way of getting the same effect through a Surface Material. Full tutorial here.
MOVING GRASS SHADER
A simple way to bring movement to the grass when the player walks through it using a Material Parameter Collection to track the players position. Full tutorial here.
DISSOLVING MATERIAL
Need to dissolve a character in and out? Here’s a quick way to do so using Opacity Masks.
Another short tutorial on how to set-up and use colour grading inside UE4. It’s super useful for regaining contrast and saturation which has been washed out by lighting!
LATEST WORK
And just for fun a couple of .gifs of my latest project:
2 screenshots below of a more low poly stylized game.
Bit of 4 player multiplayer with platforming, ignore the ugly blocks and the landscape painting is horrible just a complete prototype. Also ignore him being nude he normally is quite shy… :o
I wonder how you did your terrain painting and water? They look awesome!
Your lighting is so soft too! Any tutorials you have would be great.
I’m messing with mimicking watercolour effects using blur again. I’ve got it running MUCH faster than my previous implementation and I’ve just re-added a scalar depth threshold on it.
With a small depth threshold:
With a large one:
I am apparently the only one who likes the second picture but that’s fine!
Soon! I’m moving house atm, so all my spare time has been spent packing/unpacking. I’ve started writing up guides for how I did elements of my project, so hopefully I will get them out shortly
This is my attempt at making a hand drawn look using only post processing. It’s part of a school/personal project I’ve been working on recently. There is still a lot of work to get it where I really want it to be, but it’s also doing a lot that I hadn’t expected. The first two images are of the project and the third one is to see how it looks on a different environment I made.
Thanks, that means a lot! Depending on what’s in the scene performance can vary quite a bit. In the forest image below it dips to around 30 fps, but there is something like 4 million polygons worth of trees, grass, rocks and terrain. In areas with less geometry it is usually around 45 or higher fps. This is running on my laptop with a gtx 860m. The second image is an interior space, but it has several more lights so the frame rate is about the same. This project is only using dynamic lighting so that isn’t helping either. I’ve also started working on a material that I can use to draw or erase parts of meshes.
The last two images are from a newer version of the postprocess material where I combined and refined it a bit so I’m only using two now. I originally had it split into three different materials because it had started out as three different effects. The materials are still a bit of a mess so I don’t have any plans to show how it works until it’s in a state where someone other than me can make sense of the tangled web that is the material graph.
I’ve been watching the progress of LIFE on twitter I really love the cloud/weather system you’ve implemented!
Only thing that sticks out slightly to me in these screenshots, is the textures on the rocks seem far more detailed than the rest of the environment, which makes them pop a little bit. Some of your earlier rocks (like in the cloud shadow video) were more simply shaded and (personally) felt a better fit for your overall art style. Besides the rocks, everything else looks so nice! I adore the vibrant colour palette and the touches of details, like the ferns and flowers in the grass.
Wow that looks really nice with the refined Materials. I’m liking how you are bringing in touches of colour now too. That’s not too bad a performance hit (given the amount of poly’s in the scene) and I understand your material network messiness pain. I’ve gone away for a week, come back and looked at my Material and been like ‘I have no idea what this does or how it does it… but it works so don’t touch it!’ I’m trying to get better at writing comments, and using precise parameter names to ease that headache in future.
Any chance of seeing a video or .gif of one of your scenes? Would love to see how the world looks in motion
