Description
Warning: Some of the screenshots include assets not included in this Plugin. One of my examples is made by throwing this system onto a Modular Dungeon Pack. Keep in mind that this is a system for custom lighting in the material editor, not an asset pack!
**Included all recently (v1.5) added features like virtual dynamic shadows, outlines & stylized specular calculations. All recreatable without having to ever touch post processing at all**
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
If for any reason during one of the later updates some of the materials have stopped working in earlier 5.X versions you can grab all of the nodes again here: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/l90tdquu/
This may have something to do with 5.3s new Strata Materials making them incompatible with the older versions.
* 1.6 Changelog *
Virtual Vertex Shadows:
Outlines:
UE4:
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
All things considered is a product primarily aimed at a very specific minority of Unreal Engine users.
If you, just like me:
Then this may be exactly the thing you’ve been looking for.
In essence, my Virtual Lighting System is a Plugin that allows you to easily create beautiful, complex and dynamic Material based(!) cel shaders that are able to react to the outside influences of being currently lit/unlit, a potentially infinite amount of dynamic movable point lights with a potentially infinite amount of possible colors (within the RGB spectrum of UE ;)) all at the same time!
How do we do that? Simple, by attaching a custom Actor component to our cel shaded actors that’ll take care of generating dynamic material instances at runtime and live update their unique parameters to ensure everything is handled smoothly for you.
“But why would I use material based cel shading when things like post processing already exist?!”
There was one simple reason for me why using post processing (only) for my cel shading wasn’t an option and that reason is visual clarity. Subjectively speaking post process based cel shading will always look a bit off, as it will always be based on physically “accurate” lighting information, which will never match the simply beautiful clarity of a basic unlit material, nor does it give me the creative freedom to precisely fine tune each object and characters shading the way I’d want to.
If you’re interested in objective reasons only, here’s the list of benefits I’ve found so far:
* 1.2 Changelog *
Virtual Vertex Shadows:
* 1.3/1.4 Changelog *
Bugfixes:
* 1.5 Changelog *
Virtual Vertex Shadows:
Outlines:
Technical Details
Code Modules:
Number of Blueprints: 2 (Default Directional Light that self registers & a more user friendly Virtual Point Light Actor for you to use)
Number of C++ Classes: 3 (Subsystem, Actor Component & Virtual Point Light)
Materials: 2
Material Functions: 6
Textures: 1 (Default Engine texture to not break materials)
Network Replicated: No
Supported Development Platforms: Windows
Supported Target Build Platforms: Windows
Documentation: Link
Example Project: Project Files (~300MB zipped)
Important/Additional Notes:
Supported Engine Versions
4.27, 5.1 – 5.3
