NEW Substrate Toon Shader in Unreal Engine 5.8 | Easy Cel Shading with the New Experimental Node

The introduction of Substrate has been one of the biggest rendering changes in recent versions of Unreal Engine. While the system itself is designed to offer a much more flexible and physically accurate material workflow, Unreal Engine 5.8 introduces something that many stylized artists have been waiting for: an experimental Toon Shading node.

For years, creating anime or cel-shaded materials in Unreal Engine often meant relying on complex material graphs, post-process effects, or custom rendering techniques. With this new Substrate node, Epic Games is taking a major step toward making stylized rendering much more accessible.

In this article, I'll give you an overview of this new feature before diving into the complete implementation in the video tutorial below.

Why This New Toon Shader Matters

One of the most interesting aspects of the new Toon Shader is its simplicity.

Instead of building an extensive material graph, the new experimental node already provides convincing stylized lighting directly inside the Substrate workflow. Artists can quickly create cartoon-inspired materials while still keeping full control over important surface properties such as roughness, specular response, anisotropy, and color.

This makes it much easier to prototype stylized characters, NPCs, or environments without spending hours creating custom shading solutions.

Beyond Basic Cel Shading

Although the default Toon Shader already produces excellent results, it also integrates with Toon Profiles, allowing artists to customize how lighting behaves across a material.

These profiles provide advanced controls over:

• Diffuse lighting ramps

• Specular ramps

• Shadow transitions

• Global illumination response

• Experimental shadow hatching patterns

Rather than replacing artistic control, the Toon node provides a solid starting point that can be pushed much further depending on the desired visual style.

Combining the Shader with Outlines

A good stylized character usually relies on more than lighting alone.

In my workflow, I combine the Substrate Toon Shader with a dedicated outline material applied through the Overlay Material slot on the Skeletal Mesh. This keeps the material graph clean while providing fully adjustable outlines that can be customized independently from the main shader.

The result is a flexible setup suitable for anime characters, stylized games, cinematics, or NPR rendering.

What You'll Learn in the Video

In the full tutorial, I walk through the complete setup step by step, including:

• How to create a master Toon material using the new Substrate node

• Which parameters have the biggest visual impact

• Creating multiple Material Instance variations

• Using Fresnel to add subtle color variation

• Setting up an outline material

• Exploring the new Toon Profile asset

• Adjusting diffuse and specular ramps

• Experimenting with shadow hatching and stylized lighting

Everything is demonstrated directly inside Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview using practical examples that you can easily reproduce in your own projects.

Substrate is evolving quickly, and the experimental Toon Shader is already one of the most exciting additions for technical artists and game developers working on stylized projects.

While the feature is still marked as experimental, it demonstrates Epic Games' commitment to making non-photorealistic rendering a first-class citizen inside Unreal Engine.