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

Adjusting material complexity through quality switches


You are probably familiar with different quality settings if you've played computer games before. This doesn't happen very much on consoles, which are closed environments, but PC users often have to select between different quality presets to cater for their computer's specs. With the advent of cross-platform development, where the same project sees the light of day on multiple different devices, this need to adapt to the strengths of each device, has become more and more widespread. Not only that, but more often than not, those same devices can't support the same level of rendering features, so we need to take care of that too. You'll see how you can do this in the following pages!

Getting ready

The scene we'll be using in this recipe is quite similar to another we used back in Chapter 6, Advanced Material Techniques, when we dealt with tessellation. This is a good technique to bring back to this recipe, as that rendering feature isn...