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 by the artist rather than computed from a light source, and shadows are drawn as patterns rather than gradients.
The project is experimental. Aliasing on thin lines, inconsistencies between materials, and discrepancies between edit and game view are known limitations, documented in the repository.
