Moebius Style Shading

Implementation of a custom non-photorealistic shading model into Unreal Engine’s renderer, to emulate the classic comic book style of Moebius at real-time. Created over a few days during the Christmas holidays in 2017.

Strongly inspired by seeing videos of Shedworks’ game Sable on Twitter, I decided to try my hand at replicating this effect in UE4.

This rendering style is based on two elements:

A custom shading model that produces perfectly flat colors with very sharp edges between diffuse light, specular highlight (artist-controlled by material roughness), and shadow;

And secondly, a post-processing effect to detect edges in the resulting flat rendering and draw outlines over them.

DR3T-cFX4AAFitV.jpg
DR24OnlWAAAd88j.jpg
DR6p_HlX4AE0oXc.jpg
DR6p_JeXkAgPw1J.jpg
DR6pT8BXkAEbCTN.jpg
2020-09-19 02_04_50-[UE4] SpiderMech project with Custom Toon Shader _ Color Outlines - YouTube.png
2020-09-19 02_04_36-[UE4] SpiderMech project with Custom Toon Shader _ Color Outlines - YouTube.png
2020-09-19 02_06_07-Window.png

Take a look at my WIP thread on Twitter if you’re interested in seeing progress shots!

Source Code

The fork of Unreal Engine 4.17 with these changes is available on GitHub.

Note: You have to be logged in, with an account that is linked with your Unreal Engine account, otherwise this link will return a 404 error:

 

Previous

Warp Effect