Andrew Walker

technical artist

Miscellaneous Shaders

Contents hide
1 Gouache style
2 Layered Landscape
3 Clouds with Depth-Biased softness
4 Per-bone vertex displacement in Unity
5 Toon Crowds

Gouache style

HLSL shaders in Unity to emulate a gouache painting style.

  • Diffuse lighting & specular are modulated by using a grunge texture
  • Outlines added via inverse hull extrusion, tinted with vertex colour
  • Animated cut-out eyes with blinking, object tracking and dynamic lighting
  • Environment shader scales texturing with distance to maintain painted aesthetic
Look development – The pure black was too distracting, later versions use coloured outlines everywhere

Layered Landscape

A system for converting landscape meshes into tiered slices to emulate a cartographic style + a shader which colours based on height and a gradient.

Clouds with Depth-Biased softness

A mesh-based cloud rendering technique which renders ‘soft’ objects into a separate pass and blurs the result, then composites it back into the scene. The blur only aggregates samples from nearby pixels which are close to each other in the depth buffer, which allows a combination of crisp outlines and merging surfaces.

Per-bone vertex displacement in Unity

This system pushes bone velocity vectors into associated vertices, then animates them in the vertex shader to create a flowing motion trail. The cost scales with vertex count and sample rate.

Toon Crowds

Toon shading in Unity Shader Graph. Ambient lighting (from a diffuse cubemap) and rim-lighting create volume and enhance silhouette. The eyes are alpha cut-outs, with pupils that track objects and support for blinking.
Skinned animation baked into mesh flipbooks, to allows large amount of animated characters with minimal performance impact. A manager class batches units when they use the same animation frame, so this technique is best used on crowds performing the same action set. Some vertex position artifacting is expected, but this is negligible if the units are small in screen-space.