Painting with Code

: An Artistically Grounded Approach to Real-Time Stylization in Unreal Engine

Abstract

Many modern games, particularly those made with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), are often criticized for their visual similarity, with many titles sharing polished but rather uninspired graphics. The main cause of this is the extensive usage of default rendering tools and prebuilt assets, particularly by independent developers who might not have the time or resources to create everything from scratch. Even though UE5 has strong graphical capabilities and is capable of producing a variety of diverse looks, if developers rely too much on its built-in systems, the results may end up monotonous and generic. Stroke-Based Rendering (SBR) offers a solution to this issue by allowing games to adopt unique, stylized aesthetics inspired by traditional painting techniques. Painterly graphics are appreciated for their unique look, artistic appeal, and emotional expressiveness, but they are rarely used in UE5 games. The main reason is that they are difficult to implement and optimize for real-time performance, especially for small teams. Turning painterly attributes such as brushwork, color and composition into efficient shaders is a significant technical challenge and represents a major obstacle. This thesis shows how core traits from traditional painting can be recreated with real-time shader techniques in UE5. The implementation is done within UE5, due to its wide use among indie developers. It is also known to be challenging to customize beyond its prebuilt systems, which makes laying out practical implementations for painterly shaders even more essential. This thesis connects classical art and modern shader programming. It analyzes painting elements and turns them into practical shading solutions in UE5. The research provides a hands-on method that developers and artists can use to create painterly looks, promoting creative expression and contributing practical techniques to the field. The proposed pipeline runs mainly in the post-processing stage. It places multiple layers of object-anchored seeds on surfaces and interpolates between them to keep a consistent screen-space density. Using those anchors it builds curved strokes guided by flow maps, and composes ordered layers of strokes in screen-space. It integrates into UE5 after motion blur and before tone mapping, and exposes clear per-layer controls for artists. In the end, three case studies show how to match Baroque, Impressionist, and Expressionist looks. The work links an analysis of painting traits to concrete shader controls and documents a practical path for stylized games in UE5. It also outlines technical limits and opportunities for future work.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English (American)
Supervisor	Martin Kocur (Supervisor)