HATCH SHADER
This special shader was created for the indiegame Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers by Black Pants Game Studio. The shader is to date the only one of its kind used in a published game. It is best to whitness the Hatch Shader in Motion, so here’s a link the game’s page @ blackpants.de.
It’s based on the idea to render shadow in a 3D game using a “hatched” texture instead of plain color. This non-photorealistic effect gives the shadow and the game – world a handmade and illustrated, cartoonish look.
The different shades are broken down into six brightness levels, which are all stored in one single texture. The textures themselves are based on analogue hatched drawings done with ink and pencil on paper. These textures were scanned and the modified digitally, to create an even and seamlessly tileable pattern.
The next images display the shadow – render pass, the game view without hatch shading and the final game view with a hatched shadow.
The whole illustrative look was supported by a ingenious outline made possible also by Black Pants Studio / Johannes Spohr.
The hatch shader is inspired by the paper Real-time Hatching (Praun, Hoppe, Webb, Finkelstein) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/proj/hatching/
