Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Materials


In the previous chapter, we briefly touched on what a material is and what a texture is. A texture is like a simple image file in the format of .png/.tga. A material is a combination of different elements, including textures to create a surface property that we apply to our objects in the game. We have also briefly covered what UV coordinates are and how we use them to apply a 2D texture to the surface of a 3D object.

So far, we have only learned how to apply materials that are available in the default Unreal Engine. In this chapter, we will dive deeper into how we can actually create our own custom material in Unreal Engine 4. Fundamentally, the material creation for the objects falls into the scope of an artist. For special customized textures, they are sometimes hand painted by 2D artists using tools such as Photoshop or taken from photographs of textures from the exact objects we want, or similar objects. Textures can also be tweaked from existing texture collection to create...