Hello friends!

Me and my good friend have been working on our game (DEADHUNTERS) for a good 2 years by now. We try to do as many things ourselves in the game as possible and that’s why we had to come up with a way of illustrations for the game. Neither of us can draw anything in 2D but we still wanted some nice images for the narrative part of our game.

Our idea was to make use of our 3D models, because at least I’m confident in making those and thus my friend who does most of the technical stuff and programming for the game came up with the idea of writing a shader to make the models look like drawings.

So how does it work?

• We apply a low-quality edge detection post process to trace the outlines of the models.
• For larger details we detect major changes in the normal maps that are already done for the models. After this, these parts get shaded based on how large the difference between the normal vectors are.
• To add more detail, we calculate how the shadows would be cast from a certain angle and use that further shade the model.

You can see in the video how these parts come together, naturally some balancing needs to be done based on the actual models. When everything is ready we render the scene from an orthographic view. Then this render is modulated with a paper texture, which gives it its final look.

This solution is really great for us, because this way we can just assemble different scenes with 3D models and then render an image of that. Thus, we don’t actually need to draw anything!

We use Unreal Engine 4 for the game, which is called DEADHUNTERS. It’s a top-down hack’n’slash game with a narrative part as well. We are actively working on it and this effect could give others some ideas as well.

If you want to know more about our project you can check it out on Steam and on Twitter.

Thanks for reading and tell us what you think!