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


Even though we have already exposed ourselves to a material in Unreal Engine 4, that was back in the first chapter. We were toddlers back then! Not really, but that experience was an introductory one. Seeing the inner workings of a PBR material got us close to the material editor and several of its nodes, but we are yet to properly use and master them. And that's what we are planning to do now.

Starting gently—as we always do—we'll begin working on a simple scene where we'll learn how to set up a proper material graph for a small prop. Beyond that, we can also look at how to create materials that are going to be applied on large-scale models, and what clever techniques can be implemented to balance quality and performance. And from there, we will also take a look at a bunch of other interesting resources: material effects driven by the position of the camera, large-scale optimizations, and semi-procedural creation techniques:

Let's get started!