Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting things started in Unreal Engine 4


Before we get started with Unreal, make sure that you have installed the Epic Games Launcher. This is available for free at https://www.UnrealEngine.com/ and can be downloaded by clicking on the Get Unreal button located at the top right-hand corner of the page. You will be asked to create an account and the launcher will ask for this information when you run it.

Next, click on the Library button along the left-hand side of the screen. In the section labeled Engine versions, click on Launch on version 4.9.2 (the latest version as of this writing). If there are no engines visible, select Add Versions and follow the prompts:

The Epic Games Launcher. Clicking Library on the Unreal Engine tab will show what engine version you have, as well as your current projects

Once the engine has loaded, you will be presented with all of the projects you have been working on. For this one, let's start a new project. Click on the New Project tab at the top, as shown in the following screenshot:

The New Projects tab

At this point, Unreal provides you with a few choices. The engine comes with many free starter projects to get you started on a number of different types of projects. For our projects, we will use the First Person starter project. Make sure that the Starter Content button says With Starter Content and give the project a unique name with no spaces. When you are all set, click on Create Project, down in the bottom right. Unreal Engine 4 will load and we will be all set to start our level.