The starting point was a specific visual question: can a 3D scene feel genuinely hand-drawn, rather than just filtered to look like it? The graphic novels of Jean Giraud set the target: clean, confident outlines, flat color fills, and hatching that suggests shadow without simulating light. The video game Sable, itself directly inspired by Giraud’s work, was a concrete example of what that could look like in real-time 3D.
A video by Useless Game Dev exploring a similar approach in Unity was the main technical starting point for this project.
Achieving this required stepping away from physically-based materials and automatic lighting. Objects are rendered unlit, colors are chosen manually rather than computed from a light source, and shadows are drawn as patterns rather than gradients.
The technical side is covered in detail in the blog series.
