Lytherpole, Stylized Shaders in Unreal

During the first part of 2023 I began to re-evaluate my position in the industry and the direction I wanted to take as a developer. This is a long conversation that I may 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 will probably never see the light, except for this one.

Lytherpole is a small stylized environment where I wanted to try a couple of things: shaders and modular stylized buildings. At the beginning it was a larger project part of 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 straight panel.

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

They are split in different sections: first an outline, then using flat lights we can create something like a cell shading effect with some texture on the shadows, creating a blurry outline when something is not in focus.
Here’s an example in video.

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.