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

Animating a sea shader


Even though we've worked on water before, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about large-scale ocean shaders in UE4. I'll admit it: this is one of my favorite subjects in computer rendering, and achieving great results is completely possible thanks to the methods we are about to see. However, this is not going to be a mere expansion of any of the previous topics. Instead, we are going to continue to learn new techniques and apply new concepts throughout the following pages—so buckle up, there's no time for rest in our journey!

Getting ready

Big changes for this recipe but everything you'll need is, as always, provided either by us, included in the Starter Content, or part of the engine. Since we are going to be working on a large ocean material, it made sense to move from the familiar interior scene we've been working on to a large outdoors environment. The level we'll be working on is called 04_07_SeaShader_Start, and you can find it in the folder for this chapter...