Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Material and Light

In this chapter, we will learn in detail about the materials and the lights in Unreal Engine 4. We have grouped both Material and Light together in this chapter because how an object looks is largely determined by both—material and lighting.

Material is what we apply to the surface of an object and it affects how the object looks in the game. Material/Shader programming is a hot ongoing research topic as we always strive to improve the texture performance—seeking higher graphic details/realism/quality with limited CPU/GPU rendering power. Researchers in this area need to find ways to make the models we have in a game look as real as possible, with as little calculations/data size as possible.

Lighting is also a very powerful tool in world creation. There are many uses of light. Lights can create a mood for the level. When effectively used, it can be used to focus attention on objects in the level and guide players through your level. Light also creates shadow...