Advanced Stylization Master Material
Examples showcase: https://youtu.be/5R8sZZgN8k0
This product is a single, powerful, highly customizable stylized master material for Unreal Engine, designed to support a wide range of visual styles and production workflows with full control over lighting, shading, and performance.
It includes multiple stylized shading modes, flexible lighting support, and a bundled outline post-process material to help complete a cohesive stylized look.
Whether you are targeting cel-shaded, illustrative, graphic, or hybrid styles, this material is built to adapt to your needs while remaining optimized and easy to use.
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Scene Lighting Support
The material supports dynamic scene lighting through included Blueprint helper functions that write lighting data into a Material Parameter Collection.
Directional Light Support
A single directional light can be passed to the material using the included
Update Stylized Shader Directional Light function.Point Light Support (Up to 10 Slots)
Up to 10 point light slots are supported through the
Update Stylized Shader Point Light function.
Each material instance can manually select which point light slots affect it.
While it is not recommended to enable more than 3–4 point lights per material instance for performance reasons, this system allows you to place many lights in a scene and selectively enable only the nearby or relevant ones per object.
This approach avoids unnecessary calculations while maintaining flexible stylized lighting.
Scene lighting interaction requires the included Blueprint helper functions to update the Material Parameter Collection.
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Multiple Shading Styles
The material supports five different shading modes, selectable per material instance:
Smooth Shading
Cel Shading
Halftone Shading
Dither Shading
Hatch Shading
Each shading mode can be mapped using:
Mesh UVs
Screen-Space Mapping
Triplanar Projection
Dither shading support custom dither textures, with options for pixel-aligned dithering for precise, screen-accurate patterns.
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PBR and Texture Support
Standard PBR workflows are fully supported, including:
Base Color textures
ORM textures (Occlusion, Roughness, Metallic)
Normal maps
Detail Normal maps
Additional stylization-specific textures are also supported:
Shading Color Texture
Shading Mask Texture
Specular Mask Texture
Emissive Texture
Emissive Mask Texture
Opacity Texture
For most mask-based features, you can choose to use:
A standalone mask texture, or
The alpha channel of the Base Color or ORM textures
This reduces texture usage and supports flexible content workflows.
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Shading Mode and Blending Overrides
The material is designed to support multiple rendering workflows:
Unlit Shading Override
The default lit shading model can be overridden to unlit while preserving stylized shading by routing the base color into emissive.
This allows the material to appear shaded and detailed even in unlit mode.Opacity and Blending Overrides
When the blend mode is overridden to Masked or Translucent, the material supports opacity textures with multiple selectable mask sources.
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Shading Band Customization
The material supports up to four customizable shading bands across the stylized shading modes, with optional smoothing for softer transitions between bands.
For Cel Shading, a simple low-cost banding mode is also available that can support more than 4 bands.
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Additional Stylization Features
Further stylization options include:
Customizable shading color and intensity
Screen-space rim lighting with optional dither or halftone effects
Stylized specular highlights, including masking, color overrides, and optional dither or halftone effects
These features can be layered together to create a wide variety of looks.
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Optimized, Modular Design
The shader is built using a modular material function architecture and extensive use of static switches.
This allows you to:
Enable only the features you need
Compile only the selected features per material instance
Keep shader complexity as low as possible for each use case
Shader cost scales directly with enabled features, rather than being fixed.
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Documentation and Included Content
All parameters are:
Clearly grouped
Fully documented with in-editor tooltips
The package includes:
A Preview Map showcasing individual features and controls
An Examples Map demonstrating a variety of stylized looks created with the material
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Included Outline Post-Process Material
To complete the stylized look, an outline post-processing material is included.
Features include:
Depth-based outlines
Normal-based outlines
Adjustable thickness, color and sensitivity
Procedural noise support
Custom Depth inclusion and exclusion filtering
Objects that render to the Custom Depth pass can optionally be either:
Excluded from outlines, or
The only objects that receive outlines
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Summary
This package provides a complete, flexible stylization solution built around a single master material, with strong lighting support, multiple shading styles, performance-aware design, and an integrated outline system, ready for both artistic experimentation and production use.
Engine Compatibility: Unreal Engine 5.6 and above
Uses standard Material, Material Functions, and Blueprint systems. No plugins required.