Ghost Cat Shader - ‘Meowst’ (2025)
Made Using: Unreal Engine 5: Niagara, Blueprints, Shader Graph

Goal

For this piece, my goal was to design a stylized, friendly ghost shader inspired by Polterpup from Luigi’s Mansion 3.

Polterpup’s charm comes from his glowing eyes and mouth, a bright fresnel outline, and subtle motion within his translucent body - all balanced to feel playful rather than frightening. I wanted to capture that same energy with my own ghostly companion, a ghost kitty: Meowst.

Meowst is designed to be more adorable than eerie. I created a blueprint that gives it glowing pawprints as it walks, and a soft, blooming outline with a darker inner core - evoking that classic ghostly silhouette without leaning into horror. The shader makes the character phase in and out of visibility, leaving behind only its glowing elements during disappearance to reinforce the spectral effect.

As a bonus VFX detail, I added will-o’-wisps around Meowst, both to enhance the atmosphere and to practice integrating ambient, looping particle effects within a stylized context.

For an overview on the customizable parameters available, please watch this video:

Breakdown of all the elements in this piece

1. Main Shader/Ghostly Shader

I made use of whites/greys to make the character look like the typical storybook ghost. Polterpup has some high contrast points with the inside being darker than the intense glow in his outline. I included that contrast as a parameter to make it more customizable - if  the user prefers it to be more subtle or intense, they’re able to do that.

The white and glowing fresnel effect is foundational to this shader as well as a panning texture for subtle ‘movement’ in the ‘ghostly’ essence of Meowst. The texture is fed into a sine setup using lerp to animate the effect. Additionally, because I wanted Meowst to ‘disappear’, I used sine and time to make it disappear and reappear. By combining translucent elements (the fresnel) with ‘solid’ elements (the glowing eyes), Meowst is given an added layer of character.

See below the shader graph behind the ghost shader. Use Ctrl + Scroll to zoom in and out. Right click and drag to move/pan.

2. Glowing Paw Prints (Blueprint + Shader)

This effect was created by first setting up a collision sphere on each paw then using a line trace to spawn a decal at the specific location of impact point. These nodes were repeated for each paw and used the below shader/material for the decal.

See below the blueprint responsible for the glowing paws. Use Ctrl + Scroll to zoom in and out. Right click and drag to move/pan.

3. Will-O-Wisp (Niagara)

This will-o-wisp is a simple Niagara system using two elements only: 1) the core 2) the flame, which was made using a custom shader consisting of a stylized flame texture.