Phyllis is a watercolor-inspired city based on a passage from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Drawing from the original text, I wanted to create a light-filled environment using a watercolor shader built with Unity's Shadergraph.
The game is a short walk-through emulating a storybook design, focusing on immersing the player in a light-filled city. To create the watercolor style, I focused on emulating the light/shadow distinction that is most common and distinctive for the medium. I created hand-painted textures in Procreate and used them as the basis for the shadow distortion and texturing.
Play here
Progress images in developing the watercolor style
The watercolor shadows were based on a method in Cyanilux's shader tutorial, found here. I also built an edge on the shadow to emulate buildup at the edges of strokes, using a linear burn blending mode to increase the contrast.
To emulate watercolor's transparency on white paper, I used screen-space depth to fade objects into the background, and used as little texturing as possible in lighter areas while populating shadows with textures. Screen-space outlines are added in post-processing as well.
In the future, it would be interesting to experiment with painterly ambient occlusion, a better edge detection method, and post-processing smudging effects.
Initial concept art sketch, focusing on establishing color palette and lighting.
In engine screenshots. All models were created in Blender with animation from Mixamo.
