Artistic Effects

Artistic Effects layers a pencil-sketch, cross-hatch, or hand-drawn ink pattern over the lit surface, driven by lighting intensity and view direction. It is the fastest path from a PBR mesh to a sketchbook or graphite-illustration look.

When to use it

Sketchbook and concept renders that should read as drawings.
Tutorial or cutscene sequences that briefly drop out of full color.
Comic stack — combined with Posterize and Outline for a printed-ink result.

Difference from shadow patterns

A shadow pattern only appears inside shadows and lives in screen space. Artistic Effects covers the entire surface and tracks the UVs (or triplanar projection), so the lines stay anchored to the mesh as the camera moves.

Modes

Sketch — a tileable pencil texture multiplied by 1 - NdotL, so darker regions gain more pencil.
Hatching — a cross-hatch texture quantized by lighting: denser hatching in shadow, sparser in highlights, solid black in the deepest shadow.
Drawn — a hand-drawn ink overlay (an artist-authored 1D ramp) sampled by view angle. Because it tracks the surface rather than the camera, a rotating mesh reads as a continuous drawing.

Properties

Inspector label	Shader property	Type	Default	Description
Mode	_ArtisticMode	Enum	Off	Off, Sketch, Hatching, or Drawn.
Pattern Texture	_ArtisticTexture	Texture2D	None	Greyscale overlay pattern.
Density	_ArtisticDensity	Vector4	(4,4,0,0)	Tiling (xy) and offset (zw) of the pattern.
Threshold	_ArtisticThreshold	Float (0–1)	0.5	Lighting value at which the overlay engages.
Smoothness	_ArtisticSmoothness	Float (0–1)	0.1	Smoothstep softness of the threshold.
Line Color	_ArtisticColor	Color	RGB(0,0,0)	Tint multiplied into the overlay.
Intensity	_ArtisticIntensity	Float (0–1)	1.0	Overall blend strength.

Usage

Pick a Mode — Sketch for soft pencil, Hatching for printed ink, Drawn for irregular hand-made lines.
Assign a tileable greyscale pattern.
Tune Density until the lines read at gameplay distance.
Combine with Posterize and Outline for the complete comic stack.


material.SetFloat("_ArtisticMode", 2); // 0=Off, 1=Sketch, 2=Hatching, 3=Drawn
material.SetTexture("_ArtisticTexture", hatchTex);
material.SetTextureScale("_ArtisticTexture", new Vector2(6, 6));

Tips & gotchas

Use a tileable pattern — non-tileable hatches show seams across UV islands.
A threshold around 0.5 reads best for hatching; lower it for sparser lines, raise it for denser.
Cost is one extra texture sample, so it is safe on mobile.
Surface-locked overlays work natively in VR; no stereo adjustment is needed.

Greyscale & Posterize — completes the comic stack.
Outline — ink edges around the hatched fills.
Cel Shading — hatching reads cleaner over banded light.
Shadows — screen-space pattern alternative.