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 interior cubemaps to texture the interior of a building


We've come a long way since we started this journey, following a path that took us from very introductory concepts to more advanced ones. We've covered many different techniques along the way, and that's something that will not change, even as we near the final pages of this book. This second to last recipe will showcase yet another new technique that is very useful when working with exterior scenes filled with buildings, where windows are a prevalent element and seeing what's inside is sometimes a difficult thing to tackle.

 

You can probably think of many different video games where the windows of the buildings are shown as a static texture, with no sense of depth or of what's inside. In the following pages, we'll take a look at a more contemporary technique that brings those elements to life, adding realism to our levels.

Getting ready

Unlike most of our previous recipes, where we could almost jump into them straight away, you...