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

The design principles of a particle system


The design principles of a particle system can be configured through a research and iterative creative process. Let's take a look at each one of them in the following section.

Research

Details are probably key to designing a realistic particle system. Very often, creating a particle system lies in the realm of an artist as we need an artistic touch to create a visually appealing and somewhat realistic replica of the effect that we want to create.

For starters, it is good to research a little on what the actual effect looks like. Here are some steps to help you get started:

  • Identify the different components that are needed (break the particle effects down into the different components).

  • Determine the relationship among the different components (the size of the particles that are relative to one another, spawn rate, lifetimes, and so on).

  • Next, look at other similar effects that are created in the Computer Graphics (CG) space. The reason for doing this...