Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By : Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi
Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By: Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi

Overview of this book

Immerse yourself in the Unreal game projects with this book, written by four highly experienced industry professionals with many years of combined experience with Unreal Engine. Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 will walk you through the latest version of Unreal Engine by helping you get hands-on with the game creation projects. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects, building a dodgeball game, where you'll learn the concepts of line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects. You’ll also discover how to combine these concepts to showcase your new skills. The second project, a side-scroller game, will help you implement concepts such as animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. And finally, you'll cover the key concepts in creating a multiplayer environment as you work on the third project, an FPS game. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use the tools that the game engine provides to start building your own games.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Exploring the usage of meshes and materials

For a computer to visually represent a 3D object, it needs two things: a 3D mesh and a material. 3D meshes allow us to specify the shape of an object and its size, while a material allows us to specify its color and visual tones, among other things. We’ll dive deeper into both of these in the following sections and see how UE5 allows us to work with them.

Meshes

3D meshes allow you to specify the size and shape of an object, like this mesh representing a monkey’s head:

Figure 1.49 – A 3D mesh of a monkey’s head

Meshes are comprised of several vertices, edges, and faces. Vertices are simply 3D coordinates with X, Y, and Z positions; an edge is a connection (that is, a line) between two vertices; and a face is a connection of three or more edges. The preceding screenshot shows the individual vertices, edges, and faces of the mesh, where each face is colored between white and black,...