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

Combining multiple meshes with the HLOD tool


You may have noticed when playing AAA games that, as you get closer to an area of a map, a higher-detail version of what you've seen will come into play, or trees will suddenly start appearing. This is typically done in order to ensure that when a player is closer to an area it has the highest quality possible, but the further away it is, the less detail it needs to have. The Hierarchical Level of Detail (HLOD) tool allows you to take static objects within your levels and reduce your draw calls by having additional combined meshes to use in place of all of the individual ones. 

 

Getting ready...

You should have a level that contains a number of static meshes within it. If you don't have one already, you can also open the 08_05_HLOD_Start map within the example code of this book:

 

 

How to do it...

Before we can use the HLOD tool, we must enable it:

  1. Go the World Settings menu by going to Settings | World Settings.
  2. From the World Settings tab, scroll down...