Stylized Town Scene
Overview
My goal with this piece was to explore non-photorealistic rendering techniques and create a painterly look. I first explored Unity's Shader Graph when creating my Stylized Shader Robot Scene and I was amazed by the visual looks that could be achieved. I noticed that different painterly looks carry their own unique charm and really set the atmosphere of a scene. For this project, I wanted to create a quaint, cozy environment with warm, vibrant colors.
Features Implemented
Procedurally Generated Models (Houdini)
- Houses, towers, bushes, clouds, lanterns
Surface Shaders
- Stylized Watercolor Surface Shader
- Wobbly Watercolor Shader (Vertex Deformation on bushes, kites, clouds)
Post-Processing Effects
- Depth-Based Outlines
- Color Outlines
- Noisy Water Bleed Edge Outlines
- Edge Distortion Outlines
- Watercolor Edge Vignette
Stylized watercolor shader with procedural models, surface deformation shaders, and post processing effects.
Design System
I wanted to be super intentional with the look and feel I was creating with my envrionment. For this reason, I gathered a lot of inspiration pieces and developed a design system with a few rules that I aimed to follow.
Design System
- Simplicity in mesh, more visual focus on color/texture
- Low poly meshes
- Soft, but defined edges
- Warm colors
- Painterly texture: watercolor edges, distorted outlines, hand-drawn feel
Pipeline
I modeled procedural assets in Houdini and then packaged them into Houdini HDAs. (Within the Houdini asset tools I created, I made sure to include parameters for Unity materials to allow for easy design iterations on the final look!) I then brought these HDAs over to my Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP) project via Houdini Engine, and implemented various shaders and post processing effects using Unity's Shader Graph.
Key Procedural Components
The houses, bushes, lanterns, towers, and clouds are procedurally generated using Houdini.
Houses
For the house tool, I was inspired by the look of Townscaper houses. I really liked the simple, geometric, blocky style of thoses houses and I wanted to recreate that.
There are a variety of parameters that allow for variety in house generation, including building size/complexity/cutout intensity, as well as balcony, roof, and window shape/size.
I referenced this tutorialfor the basic floor generation and modified it to allow for multiple floors, balcony/roof/window customizability, and more.
For more information, you can check out this demo on my house tool.
Bushes
The bush tool's parameters allow for customizablility on the shape/size of the bush and pot as well as the inclusion of flowers.
Lanterns
The lantern tool's parameters allow for customizablility on the size of the lantern, including the size/height of the base and topper.
Developing a Painterly Watercolor Feel
One of the main challenges with this project was developing a cohesive watercolor feel. After creating a basic watercolor surface shader, I felt like there could still be more done to make a convincing watercolor effect. I experimented with a variety of post processing effects and in the end chose the following, which I felt really captured the charm of a hand-drawn, cozy, watercolor look.
1. Basic Watercolor Effect
- I implemented a Watercolor Surface Shader using Unity's Shader Graph, which helped accomplish a soft watercolor appearance and the characteristic watercolor bleed edges for the shadows. This was done by applying noise when sampling the direction of the light and offseting the shadow based on the noisy light rotation.
- I later also created a Wobbly Watercolor Surface Shader that I applied to the bushes to make them look like they're swaying in the wind.
- The Watercolor Shader created a really nice hand-drawn look for the shadows of the meshes. I wanted to push this by introducing more noise into the rest of the scene. I implemented a few post processing effects, including distorting the edges of the meshes, creating a subtle outline that varied with depth, and applying a vignette that mimicked the way watercolor bleeds and fades on paper
- Lastly, I added some extra polish. I wanted to simulate the subtle outlines that can happen when watercolor bleeds so I created bleed marks along the edges of the meshes. I also wanted to pull more attention to the distorted edges from the last step so I created color-based outlines.
For the watercolor shaders, I referenced Cyanilux: Watercolor Shader Experiments and for the watercolor edge marks and color outlines, I referenced Ned Makes Games: Sobel Outlines