Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Brais Brenlla Ramos
Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Brais Brenlla Ramos

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is here to stay! Since the launch of the first edition of this book, based on the Unreal Engine 5 technology, real-time rendering has only grown in popularity. The demand for expertise in this area has grown exponentially across various fields over the last few years, and Unreal Engine 5 builds upon that foundation and continues to push the boundaries of what is achievable in an interactive format. Against this backdrop, the second edition of this book takes a leap forward and explores the new opportunities offered by the latest version of the engine, including Lumen, ray tracing, and Nanite. The book also revisits previously covered techniques and updates them to current standards, shining new light on topics such as the PBR workflow and the different lighting solutions that were present in the first edition. Throughout the chapters, you’ll be able to focus on two key principles that you need to consider when dealing with real-time graphics: optimization and efficiency. By the end of this book, you’ll have explored the many rendering possibilities that Unreal Engine 5 has to offer to become the master of your own creations!
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Understanding Physically Based Rendering

Welcome to Unreal Engine 5 Shaders and Effects Cookbook!

In this first chapter, we’ll begin by studying the PBR workflow. PBR is an acronym that stands for physically based rendering – an approach to rendering a scene that takes into account how light behaves when it encounters 3D objects. This is at the core of the rendering pipeline, and the focus of the recipes you’ll encounter in the next few pages. In them, we’ll work with the building blocks of the PBR workflow – lights and materials – while also studying their impact on performance – things that we need to be aware of if we want to succeed in the rendering arena. With that in mind, this is what we are going to do:

  • Setting up a studio scene
  • Working inside the Material Editor
  • Creating our first physically based material
  • Visualizing a simple glass
  • Using IBL and Lumen to light our scenes
  • Using static lighting...