Style

Tab: Style — Mirage NPR · Plugin: Cinematic Lab

EQLabs Mirage applies a non-photorealistic look to the whole viewport as a scene-wide post-process. Pick a look, fade it with a keyable master, and exclude anything that should stay photoreal.

The Style tab with a Mirage look applied and its Look Controls expanded.

Applying a look

The Looks row applies a shipped Mirage look to the viewport in one click. The status line reads Active: <name>, or No style applied.

Custom Preset takes any Mirage settings asset (UCelShaderPostProcessSettings) — including ones you author yourself — and applies it scene-wide. The status then reads Active: <name> (custom). Clearing the field removes the style.

Remove Style deletes the scene-wide Mirage style actor and turns the look off entirely.

A Mirage look applied to the scene.

A different scene with a softer Mirage treatment applied.

Master Intensity: the keyable fade

Master Intensity (fade, keyable) multiplies the whole Mirage stack in (1.0) or out (0.0) on top of the look’s own authored Global Intensity, which lives under Look Controls → Global. The two are separate: the master is a fade, the look’s own intensity is part of its authoring.

To key the fade over a shot:

1. Add to Sequencer binds the Mirage Style actor into the open Level Sequence.
2. Enable the Sequencer’s Auto-Key.
3. Slide Global Intensity at different playhead times.

The panel spells that sequence out on the control itself — “then Auto-Key + slide Intensity to keyframe the look” — because the binding step is the one people miss.

Look Controls

The selected look’s own parameters, editable in place. Save as Preset… keeps your edits permanently as a new settings asset — without it, edits live only on the current style actor.

Enabling the hatching layer in a Mirage look's controls.

Exclusion: keeping things out of the look

Three actions:

Action	What it does
Exclude Selected	Select mesh actors in the viewport, then click — adds a Cel Shader Exclude component and turns on the Exclusion stage
Remove from Selected	Removes the component; those actors rejoin the Mirage look
Exclude Skybox	The sky and far plane render normally while everything else is stylised

This needs Custom Depth-Stencil, and it fails silently without it

Exclusion depends on Project Settings → Rendering → Custom Depth-Stencil Pass = “Enabled with Stencil” (r.CustomDepth=3). With it off, the component is still added and the stage still turns on — and nothing changes on screen.

Cinematic Lab does not let that pass quietly:

• The Style tab shows a warning banner: “Custom Depth-Stencil (r.CustomDepth=3) is off in this project, so ‘Exclude Selected’ and skybox exclusion have no visible effect.”
• Next to it, Enable Custom Depth-Stencil (writes project config) writes r.CustomDepth=3 into your DefaultEngine.ini and enables it immediately. Restart the editor if exclusion still does not take effect.
• If you use exclusion anyway, the style manager raises a toast pointing at the same button.

Exclusion applied to selected actors, with the Custom Depth-Stencil state shown.

See Getting started & project requirements for this and the other three project settings.

Style travels with the shot

The Shot Manager tab’s Capture Look to Shot stores the scene-wide Mirage style alongside the lighting, so a stylised look and the lighting that flatters it travel together and restore together. Restore runs in a single transaction — one Ctrl+Z undoes the whole swap.

Notes

• Mirage is scene-wide, not per-object, from this tab. Exclusion is how you carve objects out of it. Per-object cel shading exists in the CelShaderFX runtime module, but the Style tab drives the scene-wide path.
• Distance shadows need a second project setting. The Mirage post-process component’s DistanceShadow stage samples the global distance field and no-ops when r.GenerateMeshDistanceFields is 0, warning in the log rather than failing loudly.
• Edits are not saved until you save them. Look Controls changes live on the style actor; Save as Preset… is what makes them permanent.