Stylize And Fine Tune Post Process Material

Animated Video showing the stylizing power of this painterly post process material

Overview video

Video showing the effect of each parameter

For Beginners: Video on how to apply a Material To Post Process Volume

Disclaimer:

The product contains only post process materials. The levels shown in the images and the videos are for presentation purposes only and they came from the Epic Games marketplace free projects: 'Soul: Cave' and 'Sun Temple'.

The Domain of use:

Only deferred rendering.

Only Windows 64 bit.

New:

• Ability to tune the sky separately: In section 0. Global enable the parameter Use Separate Parameters For Sky and you will get additional parameters for the sky. This gives you more control over your scene.
• Custom Depth Invert: A new switch parameter called Invert Custom Depth under section: 0.Global. If this parameter is switched to true, the post-processing effect will apply only to the custom depth objects.

Tips:

• If you want water surfaces, like the new water system (4.26), to keep their quality do this: The parameter Base Color Amount should be small, even zero will work.

Stylize and Fine Tune Post Process material is similar to the Painterly material:

With 4 additional advanced features:

1. Taking into account the sky atmosphere by the cel bands, so cel toon could be applied to volumetric clouds for example. PS. Work better with the 'after tonemapping' blendable location which can cause some aliasing effects. This feature is switchable.
2. Focusing on giving more control over the light and the dark areas. In other words: after dividing your shade using cel toon bands, the bands are a discrete interpolation between the dark one (in the shadow) and the light one. Stylize and Fine Tune gives you similar parameters of Painterly, but the parameters are in 2 groups: one for the dark band and the other for the light band. It is offering the Painterly features but with the freedom to fine-tune each area (dark and light) separately.
3. Add a shading texture to each band, usually a checker-like texture giving the dotty effect you usually find in comic books.
4. Able to make the tint color of each band replacing the scene color, this effect combined with an outline will give you a hand-drawn sketch effect.

The following features are similar to the Painterly ones, but in this product you fine tune each cel toon band separately using these parameters:

• Paint Stroke Distortion Effect: Select your paint stroke normal texture effect, tweak scale, intensity and get an artistically painted feel to your scene.
• Paint Stroke Color Gradient: Select your paint stroke grayscale texture and use it as a base for your selected color gradient Curve Atlas to colorize your scene with a brush stroke style.
• On Lighting Color Gradient: Use the shades of your scene as a grayscale base to colorize the scene with your selected color gradient Curve Atlas.
• Cel shading: able to choose between 2 or 3 shade transitions with customizable dark and light colors.
• Outline: normal and depth outline. Color, thickness, and distance fading are customizable.
• Base Color Amount parameter: In each material instance you have this important parameter giving you the ability to apply the effect on the original scene with all its lights and shades or simply applying the effect to the base color (GBuffer) of the scene to give it a more classical cartoonish feel.
• Sharpen, Darken, and tweak Saturation: with customizable intensity.
• Vignette: able to choose between sharp or smooth vignette plus the ability to invert it and play with its intensity and radius.
• Split Compare: split the screen to compare to the original scene.
• Custom Depth: To exclude an actor from the effect, enable its 'Render CustomDepth Pass'. You can find this parameter in the Rendering section of the actor.
• 3 blendable locations available: After Tonemapping, Before Tonemapping and Before Translucency. The before translucency one conserves translucent effects in your scene, like water, glass, or depth of field.

Flexibility:

The post processing nature of the material makes it applicable and tweak-able for any project. Just create your postProcess volume and apply your material instance to it.

Easy and intuitive to use:

Create your material instance, tweak a few parameters, and get an infinite amount of painterly cel toon postProcess shader styles.

Intuitive parameters' names:

No technical names, a parameter name tells exactly what a parameter does.

If the name is not enough, some parameters have descriptions, just hover over your parameter.

Performance:

Base pass shader without light map: 33 instructions

Base pass vertex shader: 47 instructions