[Showcase] Lytherpole, Stylized Shaders in Unreal

During the first part of 2023 I began to reevaluate my position in the industry and the direction I wanted to take as a develper. This is a long conversation that I'll post in a separate entry but all that re-direction develop in a change of art style, starting for a number of experiments and projects that probably never see the light of day except for Lytherpole.

Lytherpole is a small stylized environment where I wanted to try a couple of things: shaders and modular sytlized buildings. At the beginning it was a larger project where we wanted to create a cinematic but the lack of time after a full-time job and co-operation ended up on a solo project.

The buildings are not very complex, I focused on the shapes to make them right and appealing. One of the main techniques for the domes and any circular building were the use of arrays and curvates so I just needed to do one panel. An example:

The key of the project are the shaders. Here is how it looks:

They are splitted in different sections, first an outline, pretty basic and the second one was focus on flat light to create something like a cel shading effect with some texture on the shadows, creating a blurry outline when something is not in focus. This is an example in video.

And the breakdown of the shader:

Lytherpole is the old name of Liverpool. If you know the city you'll notice the tower of the cathedral on the left and the Victoria Clock Tower on the right. It's a mix of some elements of the city and my own view of this project. In the end, we didn't do the cinematic, but I had a preview of the concept in case you are interested to see it:

I work on everything in the scene except the sculptures, the main one is Taoist Punk from https://www.artstation.com/lucas23 and the smallest ones are from TurboSquid.