Mert Kaan.
← All projects
Render pass 01 — thesis2026

Stylized Shadow Textures

A custom UE5 plugin that reconstructs cross-hatched, non-photorealistic shadows on top of the forward shading renderer — the technical core of my thesis.

  • Unreal Engine 5
  • HLSL / Material Graph
  • C++ (GameInstanceSubsystem)

The problem

Forward-shaded stylized renderers rarely get first-class access to shadow information the way deferred pipelines do. I set out to reconstruct a usable shadow mask post-hoc, then redraw it as a stylized hatch pattern instead of a soft shadow — while staying cheap enough for real-time use.

System overview

The plugin centers on UStylizedShadowsSubsystem, a UGameInstanceSubsystem that owns a SceneCapture2D used to recover scene BaseColor at runtime. A directional-light transform delegate and a 30 fps timer push camera and light data into a MaterialParameterCollection, which a post-process material reads to rebuild the shadow mask:

  • Desaturation of the captured BaseColor
  • Luminance-ratio thresholding to isolate occluded regions
  • Albedo bias correction (dividing out BaseColor) so dark materials don’t get misread as shadow
  • Specular suppression via Roughness multiplication
  • Triplanar hatch-pattern blending across the reconstructed mask

Notable problems solved

  • Incorrect subsystem override methods that silently no-op’d
  • A timer firing before any PlayerController existed
  • A color-cancellation bug where the hatch pattern turned black on saturated surfaces, traced to how the post-process material blended scene color

Result

Isolated shader cost measured very low on an RTX 3070 at 1440p — the reconstruction step stays cheap relative to the rest of the frame.

The thesis names two framing contributions: the “Uncanny Valley of Digital Hatching” and the “Post-Process Gap” between what deferred and forward renderers expose to stylization passes.