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 mini map


Now that we are familiar with dynamic UI elements, let's continue exploring this topic by creating a mini map! This can be a nice extension to the compass we just created, as both elements often appear side by side in games and apps. Furthermore, it will add a new layer of interactivity between what's happening in game and its visual representation on the UI. Let's see what this is all about:

Getting ready

You'll need a couple of things this time, which, as always, are provided by us if you want to follow along using the same assets, but using your own resources will be completely fine. The basic building blocks you'll need if you want to go solo come in the shape of a couple of textures that will act as a map and as the player's position locator. Luckily for us, we don't need to create them in an external piece of software if we don't want to – we can find perfectly valid solutions thanks to the already-included engine content and a couple of tricks I'll show you later...