Chinese Ink Brush Effect

Hello!

I'm Katrina, a game dev/artist who primarily works in Unity. My educational background is in IT and game art and design, but I grew up learning traditional painting and calligraphy. I've always been drawn to ancient Chinese and Japanese ink paintings, mostly the beautiful loose brushwork within the art style.

Using Shader Graph, I have emulated these brush strokes, trying to make them look as organic as traditional calligraphy. Making use of UV mapping on the 3d meshes, I can manipulate the direction of the brush stroke along the X axis. Through this method, it is my hope to be able to animate these meshes in such a sequence that seems like the ink is coming to life.

This is just a short demo of how the brush stroke shader can be used as a learning tool for Chinese calligraphy. In the project is a slider that allows the user to scrub through the animation of the correct stroke order of the Chinese character (花) "Flower".

I can foresee many uses for this effect in games and animation that take inspiration from traditional ink paintings and calligraphy such as Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Mahjong Soul, Okami, etc. The textures can be easily modified to produce various types of brush strokes.

As it works with 3d meshes, it functions well for virtual galleries that allow people to experience art in full 360° motion rather than just a static flat art piece.

References: Zeng Ryan, Thomas Lang