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

Creating a candle material with SSS


One of the first materials we'll explore outside the opaque blend mode realm is going to be wax. Wax! I think that this can serve as a good first example in this journey we are about to start, as it is a nice bridge between the Chapter 3Opaque Materials and Texture Mapping, and some of the further recipes you'll find in this one. Why? Well, we'll be using the SSS shading model in order to build up this material, and that is neither too different from the previous opaque model nor too similar to some others that we'll be seeing in a few pages. 

Getting ready

You can follow along by opening the 04_01_Subsurface_Start map located inside the Content / UE4ShadersAndEffects / Maps / Chapter04 folder. As always, all of the assets that you'll be seeing in the next few pages can be found in there—but what if you want to use your own?

You'll need a couple of things, as you did in previous chapters—the first being a basic scene setup with some lights so that we can...