Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How to use UV mapping and why it's important


At this point, we have the geometry, or basic shape of our crate down, but it still doesn't really look like the objects we see in other games. The reason is textures. Texturing our object will create all those little details that will make our game asset worthy of the level we have built. Making our textures and getting them on the object is a two-step process. First, we need to tell our textures how to behave and that takes a UV map:

Learning unwrapping with a basic cube

A UV map is a set of coordinates that tell texture maps we have placed on a game asset how to wrap themselves around our object. The principle is to take your 3D object and flatten it, so that we can apply an image to the outside in a manner that doesn't tear or stretch the texture. This allows us to create detailed texture maps that apply things like scraped edges, rust spots, paint colors, visual screens, and more. Without it, Unreal will not know how to texture our object in...