Unreal Engine 5.5 Post Process Watercolor Shader
About halfway through development, the art director on the project asked for this shader to have diagonal lines in the shadows. To add this functionality, I masked out the shadows and multiplied them by a world-aligned texture.
Shader works on a simple cell shader as the base for all color decisions.
It’s completely post-process made, so the only implementation is adding the material to the post-process material array!
This Section controls the brunt of the watercolor effect, utilizing C++ code to essentially warble the colors together. The radius x and y controls how far the watercolor can pull colors, and the view size controls the tiling of the UVs.
Like most color-effect shaders, the backbone of the functionality is a simple cell shader.
One of the main ways this shader achieves the watercolor effect is to strengthen the effect the farther away from the camera and objects is essentially blurring the background.
