Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Essentials

By : Satheesh PV, Satheesh P.V
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Essentials

By: Satheesh PV, Satheesh P.V

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of game development tools that gives you power to develop your game and seamlessly deploy it to iOS and Android devices. It can be used for the development of simple 2D games or even stunning high-end visuals. Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today. This book will introduce you to the most popular game development tool called Unreal Engine 4 with hands-on instructions for building stunning video games. You will begin by creating a new project or prototype by learning the essentials of Unreal Engine by getting familiar with the UI and Content Browser. Next, we'll import a sample asset from Autodesk 3ds max and learn more about Material Editor. After that we will learn more about Post Process. From there we will continue to learn more about Blueprints, Lights, UMG, C++ and more.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Lightmass Global Illumination


Lightmass is the high-quality static Global Illumination solver created by Epic games. Global Illumination (GI) means the process that simulates indirect lighting (for example, light bouncing and color bleeding from surfaces). In Unreal Engine, light bounces by default with Lightmass and is based on the base color of your material, which controls how much light should bounce from the surface of the object. Even though a more highly saturated color will bounce more light, and a less saturated color will bounce less, it all depends on the scene. In a simple room-like scene, this can be noticeable, whereas if it's an outdoor day scene this might not be that noticeable.

Let's take a quick look at the following scene:

This is a simple scene in unlit mode.

Now I added one Directional Light and this is how it looks with no GI. That means there is only direct lighting and no indirect lighting (meaning there is no light bouncing).

The previous screenshot is with static GI...