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

Unwrapping complex objects


Back in Chapter 3, It's Time to Customize!, we learned a simple technique for UV unwrapping called Smart UV Project, a tool that can unwrap simple objects automatically. This process worked great for our crate, but the crate was little more than a slightly modified box. The crate really didn't have much in the way of curves and its triangle count only reached 516. The Artifact will take a little bit more work to unwrap. Our new asset contains 42 separate pieces and has a whopping 54,000 triangles. To unwrap this monstrous game asset, we will need to apply several new tools and techniques.

Marking seams

Seams are lines along which Unwrap tool can slice an object to flatten it out during the unwrapping process:

Using custom seams to UV Unwrap a basic cube

Using the Mark Seam tool, we can control which lines becomes seams, giving us complete control of the process. We can also use this tool to hide our seams in places a player will not be able to see them. This can be...