Pokemon mystery dungeon shadow effect

In the PDM remake, the developers wanted to recreate the pastel and pencil effect of the original game.

A few days after the game was released, I decided to recreate the shadow effect of the game using Unity3D.

Original effect

My effect

To achieve this shadow effect, I’ve created a shader that will change the rendering of the shadow that the ground receive.

So I started to search how to achieve this effect and I’ve found this useful article:  https://medium.com/@shahriyarshahrabi/custom-shadow-mapping-in-unity-c42a81e1bbf8

So, I decided to replicate the outline shadow effect which was featured in the article and use it as a base. Then I reduced the thickness of the outline and created a new 2D texture channel.

 _ShadowTex("ShadowTex",2D) ="white" {}

Then, I’ve drew a simple pencil sketch in photoshop, imported it and use it in my channel.

Finally, by multiplying the shadow result by the sketch channel color, it create the desired effect.

 col.xyz = lerp(pow(col.xyz, 3.6)*texColor, col.xyz, shadowmap);