SHOWCASE
TUTORIAL
DOCUMENTATION
GAMEPLAY

CelPaint for UE5 is a stylized postprocess shader designed to turn realtime 3D scenes into a painterly, illustrated, celshaded style. It combines an advanced brush like painterly filter with a powerful celshader and several additional techniques to achieve a handmade stylized look.

The shader is intended for developers and artists who want a flexible stylized rendering pass without rewriting their project’s lighting system. It can be used for games, movies, art projects, comics, cinematics, or any project that requires a painterly illustrated art style.

CelPaint is controlled through a Post Process Material Instance and supports global scenewide settings as well as object specific control through Custom Depth Stencil values.

Note: CelPaint is written in HLSL. All essential parameters are exposed through the material instance for easy customization without touching code, but modifying the shader itself requires knowledge of the shader language.

Looking for a Retro or Comic inspired Artstyle? Check out CelDither, my Surface Stable Dithering, Halftoning, and Celshading system.

FEATURES

• Stylized Painterly Effect: Employs an advanced, contour following directional brush filter that dynamically stretches, squashes, and wraps strokes along the structural silhouettes of your 3D models. This ensures your brush strokes follow the geometric form of your assets, providing a genuinely handpainted aesthetic rather than a flat overlay.

• Advanced CelShading: Operates as a luminance preserving rescale, so it bands lighting without shifting hue, saturation, or overall scene brightness, keeping your original art direction and exposure fully intact. Works with any lighting setup including directional, point, spot, rect, and sky lights, static or fully dynamic, and integrates seamlessly with Lumen GI and reflections out of the box. Celbanding is decoupled into independent channels for base textures, dynamic lighting, and final screen luminance, giving you deep control over the stylized look.

• Granular Stencil Masking & Overrides: Utilizes a robust Custom Depth Stencil system to selectively include, exclude, or completely override settings on a per mesh basis.

• Resolution Aware AutoScaling: Automatically scales brush stroke and spread behavior with the current resolution. The art style remains perfectly consistent across shifting resolutions and dynamic upscalers.

• Sky Support: Built with a specialized depth routing branch that handles SkyAtmosphere and Volumetric Clouds flawlessly, giving the sky its own dedicated controls, separate from the rest of the scene.

• Zero Art Pipeline Friction: CelPaint runs entirely as an isolated postprocess material pass, meaning you do not need to rewrite your master materials, modify custom lighting blueprints, alter your project's asset library, or compromise your use of Lumen GI and reflections to achieve a beautifully stylized look.

• Worldspace Canvas Distortion: Simulates the natural hand imperfections of a real painting through triplanar noise warping anchored in worldspace, so the distortion stays attached to surfaces as the camera moves instead of swimming across the screen. Separate near and far controls let you tune the imperfection level by distance.

• Multi Layered Detail Protection: Preserves fine detail through several complementary systems working together: a Sobel based edge detector that locally reduces brush spread on high frequency areas, an adjustable detail sensitivity threshold for tuning how aggressively edges are protected, independent near and far protection strengths so distant geometry can simplify naturally while close detail stays crisp, and an optional depth aware edge bleed limiter that prevents strokes from smearing across object silhouettes.

• Metallic Aware Stylization: Metallic surfaces receive their own dedicated banding control and are automatically protected from texture level celshading, preventing the common artifacts that appear when stylization is applied to reflective materials.

• ...and much more: Granular pigment diffusion, depth based near/far stroke spread, anisotropic stroke directionality, samplestep optimization controls, etc. See the documentation for more.

LIMITATIONS

• Forward Shading is not supported. CelPaint relies on GBuffer data, which is only available in the deferred renderer.

• Mobile rendering is not supported.

• Translucent materials are not fully supported. They are affected only as part of the final scene color and will not receive the same stylization as opaque surfaces, since the shader depends on scene depth and GBuffer data.

Important Note: Set Custom Depth-Stencil Pass to Enabled with Stencil. It is required for all the masking in the shader.

Note: Assets and environments shown in the demonstration images are not included with the shader.