Technical Artist
Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
Custom Cel Shader
Key Features
1–4 configurable cel-shading bands with independent color/intensity and threshold controls
Directional-light-driven shading using scene lighting information
Reusable Material Function for modular integration into the master material
Artist-friendly Material Instances exposing shader controls without graph editing
Adjustable shadow saturation and contrast
Adjustable rim lighting with bias, contrast, and intensity controls
Support for albedo, normal, emissive, roughness, and metallic maps
Adjustable emissive color and intensity
Tools Used
Unreal Engine
The game project I participated in needed a cel shader that could interact with the lighting environment. For this task, my goal was to provide a production-ready stylized shader while building a deeper understanding of Unreal's Material Functions, parameterized materials, and node-based shader logic. The shader evaluates directional lighting and converts the resulting light information into configurable bands, allowing artists to define between one and four distinct lighting regions.
The core shading logic is contained in a reusable Material Function and integrated into a parameterized master material, allowing individual assets to be customized through Material Instances without modifying the underlying shader graph. Additional controls provide adjustable shadow color, saturation and contrast, specular highlights, rim lighting, sky-light influence, normal-map response, and exposure compensation.
Made for the 3D Game - Outertide
References
Core cel-shading banding and masking techniques were adapted from tutorials by Pitchfork Academy. The shader was modified and expanded to meet the project's visual and technical requirements.
