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

Changing from a sunny scene to a snowy one through parameter collection


Another common issue that is seen in game development is that you sometimes want to have multiple materials change at the same time. We've already learned about parameters and how we can change them at runtime using Blueprints, but you have to change each material parameter individually.

Material parameter collections allow us to create special variables that can be referred to in multiple materials and then modified in an editor or at runtime through Blueprints or C++. To see just how easily it can be used, in this recipe, we will show you how we can make multiple materials in an environment so that it looks like it has snowed.

Getting ready...

To begin, you will need to create a material with two states: one state where it's completely dry and another for when it has snowed. You'll connect both states to a Linear Interpolation (Lerp) node. Alternatively, you may use a LayerBlend like we did in our previous recipe.

 

How...