Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Brais Brenlla Ramos, John P. Doran
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Brais Brenlla Ramos, John P. Doran

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game engine, one which has seen a recent boost in widespread adoption thanks to its ease of use and the powerful rendering pipeline that it packs. Seeing as how it's relatively easy to create stunning presentations and visuals, Unreal has quickly become a strong contender in industries where this kind of software had been previously denied entry. With that in mind, this book aims to help you get the most out of Unreal Engine 4 - from creating awe-inspiring graphics to delivering optimized experiences to your users. This is possible thanks to a mixture of hands-on experience with real materials and the theory behind them. You will immediately know how to create that material that you want to display, and you'll also end up with the knowledge that will let you know how to control it. All of this will be done without losing sight of two key components of any real-time application - optimization, and efficiency. The materials that you create will be light and efficient, and they will vary depending on your target platform. You'll know which techniques can be used in any kind of device and which ones should be kept to high-end machines, giving you the confidence to tackle any material-related task that you can imagine. Hop onboard and discover how!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Baking out a material


Materials are a type of asset that can be sometimes simplified without losing any quality. Think, for example, about the shader we created in the previous recipe—we made use of several nodes to make sure that it looked good both on close-ups as well as when the camera was far from the object the material was being applied to. Creating materials that way can sometimes be expensive for the GPU, especially if the object that is being rendered is very far from the screen or at a point where we can no longer make out the subtleties on its surface. 

For those cases, Unreal offers us the possibility of baking out a material into another one, a more simplified version of our initial asset. What we'll be doing now is reducing the complexity of the original material graphs by baking out simple textures that behave just like the more complicated original material graphs we had previously set up. Let's go!

Getting ready

The scene we will be using throughout this recipe is the level...