Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Brais Brenlla Ramos, John P. Doran
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Brais Brenlla Ramos, John P. Doran

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game engine, one which has seen a recent boost in widespread adoption thanks to its ease of use and the powerful rendering pipeline that it packs. Seeing as how it's relatively easy to create stunning presentations and visuals, Unreal has quickly become a strong contender in industries where this kind of software had been previously denied entry. With that in mind, this book aims to help you get the most out of Unreal Engine 4 - from creating awe-inspiring graphics to delivering optimized experiences to your users. This is possible thanks to a mixture of hands-on experience with real materials and the theory behind them. You will immediately know how to create that material that you want to display, and you'll also end up with the knowledge that will let you know how to control it. All of this will be done without losing sight of two key components of any real-time application - optimization, and efficiency. The materials that you create will be light and efficient, and they will vary depending on your target platform. You'll know which techniques can be used in any kind of device and which ones should be kept to high-end machines, giving you the confidence to tackle any material-related task that you can imagine. Hop onboard and discover how!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


As you probably already know, Unreal combines many different pipelines in order to create whatever it is you are after—a video game, an app, an architectural walk-through. From animation to rendering, there are many different fields of study that we could be looking at. However much we would like to do so, the topics are just too wide to be tackled here. But even though we are not going to be looking at all of them, there is one important aspect that we need to pay attention to. It is one that directly affects the material and the rendering pipeline—we are talking, of course, about post-processing effects.

At their core, post-processing effects are a rendering pass that happens after our materials have been constructed but before the whole scene is outputted to the screen. They are like a layer that we can insert between what we have created and what the user experiences, so they are very powerful tools that enable us to modify and correct what we have previously done. Throughout...