Hatching & Drawing Shader – Procedural NPR Post-Process System

Transform your Unreal Engine scene into a living pencil sketch - no hand-drawn assets required.

Whether you're building a stylized indie game, an architectural visualization, or an artistic cinematic experience, this post-process system gives your world the feel of a hand-crafted illustration in real time.

Why This Shader Stands Out

Most NPR shaders give you a flat look. This one gives you control. The entire hatching system is driven by your scene's actual lighting — lines appear, shift, and deepen automatically as the sun moves. Shadow zones are split into layers (low, mid, high, upper) and each one can be assigned its own hatching style, density, and character. The result feels genuinely drawn, not filtered.

The Scribbleness factor adds organic line wobble so nothing looks mechanical. Pair that with two independent noise-driven wobble layers and per-line density variation, and you get that satisfying imperfection that makes hand-drawn art so appealing.

With 20+ included hatching textures spanning cross-hatch, parallel lines, stippling, mesh, wavy, diagonal, and more. You can mix styles across shadow zones to achieve everything from clean technical illustration to loose expressive sketching. Additionally a fully autonomous Procedural hatching Generator is included. A built-in debug/heatmap mode color-codes exactly which texture zone is active where, making tweaking fast and intuitive.

The system also includes a paper background post-process and a customizable outline material with kernel size and shape ratio controls, so your scenes can look fully self-contained.

What's Included

Material Functions

• MF_ProceduralHatching - the full-featured hatching generator with 14 exposed parameters

• MF_ProceduralHatchingSimple, MF_ProceduralHatchingStable, MF_ProceduralPixelHatching - alternative variants for different use cases

Post-Process Materials

• M_PP_Hatching - main scene hatching material with curve-based shadow masks

• Paper background post-process + outline material (with Alpha, KernelSize, ShapeRatio controls)

• 7 post-process materials total

Hatch Materials & Textures

• 20+ hatch materials across styles A–F (M_Hatch_A1 through F5)

• 20+ corresponding hatch textures (T_Hatch_ series)

Curves & Control Assets

• CA_HatchingCurves + individual curves for High, Mid, Low, Upper shadow zones and shadow mask

• Alternative curve sets included for quick style switching

Blueprints & Utilities

• BP_Renderer blueprint

• 4 Render Targets (HatchingTexture1–4)

Demo Content

• Full demo map

• Chess pawn mesh (SM_Pawn) included

How It Works

The post-process material reads your scene's lighting and shadow information, then routes different shadow intensity zones through independently configured hatching generators. Each zone references a curve asset that controls how shadows are shaped and where hatching appears. The hatching itself is fully procedural - generated in-material using the MF_ProceduralHatching function, so you're not locked into fixed texture resolutions. Adjust density, thickness, line breaking, wobble, and angle per zone until it looks exactly the way you want.

⚠️ Please note: The market stall scene and the nature scene visible in some demo renders uses Megascans asset that is not included in this pack. All other demo content, including the chess pawn, is included.