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

Using an emissive material to light the scene


One of the first examples that we'll explore is a material – a lamp, to be precise – that is being used outside of its traditional comfort zone. This light-emitting object isn't going to rely on a light asset derived from one of the many different engine classes that are available to us—instead, we'll use a good, old material to do the job. We won't stop there though, as creating the material is actually not the difficult part. What's going to be tricky is getting the right results out of the light baking process, so we'll explore which settings we need to tweak there. All in all, we'll have access to a powerful way of faking and computing light which will come in handy in many different situations.

Let's start exploring one of them! Take a look at the following screenshot:

Getting ready

Even though we are going to be using some custom 3D models and textures in this recipe, this is just so we have something pretty to look at. If you want to use...