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

How does Blender handle animation?


You might remember back in Chapter 2, Starting Our First Project, that we touched very briefly on keyframes, those little recorded points in time that we use to animate objects. Blender uses tools that are very similar to using Timeline and Matinee in UE4, so let's spend a little bit of time building on that knowledge. Remember that keyframes represent important positions in time in our animations. In the case of our door, it was the open and closed positions. For our elevator, it was the up and down positions.

Those keyframes help Unreal and Blender to create what are called Tweens—all those little minor movements in between major points. Along with the keyframes, 30 of them make up one second of animation. Back in the heyday of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and the Flintstones, animation houses had Senior Animators, who would create all the keyframes. They would then turn those over to Junior Animators who would draw all of the tween frames by hand. This process...