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

Using different maps to create a more realistic look


Materials in Unreal Engine 4 are made of several different textures working together to provide a realistic result. Generally, a material for a game asset has at least two to three different texture maps that are being manipulated by different mathematical nodes. These maps are usually a Diffuse map, a Specular map, and a Normal map:

The coloring of the Artifact is determined by the Diffuse map

Diffuse maps are the basic colors that we have painted on our objects. Unreal accepts these textures in the Material Editor as the object's Base Color. These maps generally contain color and pattern information that is painted directly onto a copy of the object's UVs in programs such as Photoshop. Simply put, this type of map contains the surface colors of our object.

Next is the Specular map:

The Specular map controls how light behaves when it hits a surface

Specular maps control how shiny or dull a surface appears to be and can be hand painted or...