Achieving Surreal Stylized Pencil-Drawn Comic Look For UE5 Environment

Technical Artist Salvador Marín Sánchez recently presented his latest variation of comic post-processing with a forest game environment featuring various stylized characters. The video above represents a midway approach, blending comic and graphite post-processing filters over a fully lit 3D scene.

To achieve this look, he applied graphite texture overlays based on world normals during the post-processing stage, giving the environment a pencil-drawn feel. For the inlines, he extracted details from the blue channel of the normals, combined with depth-based edges. Stencil masks were then used to highlight interactable elements with color, adding a broken "explode" effect that overlays colored blotches unique to each object's identity.

As Salvador shared with us, this is actually a newly designed visual style for a level in Eyes on Yuki, an upcoming game from Atabey Creations where players must protect an adorable creature named Yuki.

This comic-style shader is made for a different part of the game, where shadows are enhanced with broken crosshatching or lines for shading, depending on their darkness, and dots that increase in size based on the intensity of the light. Moving away from the typical comic style, Salvador kept the scene's original colors using an overlay with a posterized effect to preserve the vibrancy without overwhelming them.

He also applied stencil techniques to multiply the color of interactive elements, highlighting them with a broken, exploded outline. This helps players clearly identify what they can interact with, even amidst the visual complexity. Additionally, instead of utilizing the usual black lines to define shapes, Salvador used a color multiplier in these areas, giving them a rim light effect.

For more details about Eyes on Yuki, be sure to check out Atabey Creations' socials and visit Salvador Marín Sánchez's LinkedIn page. Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.