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

Painting a mesh with vertex painting


As we said in the introduction to this chapter, we are going to learn and use some advanced techniques that we haven't seen yet. We'll start off by looking at an important and useful technique called vertex painting, which will allow us to assign specific values to the vertices that make up our models with the aim of reusing that information to drive the appearance of the materials we apply to them. This can be very useful under certain circumstances, such as when we don't want to use masks to define how materials look or to manually paint specific effects on an object. I'm sure you'll find this technique very useful once we take a proper look at it, so let's not delay that any further!

Getting ready

Vertex painting is a technique that is not very demanding in terms of the objects that you need to have in order to use it. You'll basically need a model and a material, which you can easily get hold of through the Starter Content, either by using your own...