Book Image

Mastering Unreal Engine 4.X

By : Muhammad A.Moniem
Book Image

Mastering Unreal Engine 4.X

By: Muhammad A.Moniem

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 has garnered a lot of attention in the gaming world because of its new and improved graphics and rendering engine, the physics simulator, particle generator, and more. This book is the ideal guide to help you leverage all these features to create state-of-the-art games that capture the eye of your audience. Inside we’ll explain advanced shaders and effects techniques and how you can implement them in your games. You’ll create custom lighting effects, use the physics simulator to add that extra edge to your games, and create customized game environments that look visually stunning using the rendering technique. You’ll find out how to use the new rendering engine efficiently, add amazing post-processing effects, and use data tables to create data-driven gameplay that is engaging and exciting. By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional games with stunning graphics using Unreal Engine 4!
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Unreal Engine 4.X
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The ambient occlusion


We usually call the indirect shadow ambient occlusion. When lightmass gets built, it calculates the ambient occlusion (AO for short from now on).

Lightmass works by calculating AO, and then applying it to direct and indirect illumination, and finally baking it into lightmaps. The AO is enabled by default, but you can still disable it for your own artistic goals. Disabling it is very easy: you need to uncheck the checkbox Use Ambient Occlusion in Lightmass Settings of the Lightmass tab within World Settings:

Don't forget that you have to rebuild the lightmass in order to update it to the latest configurations you have changed (just hit the Rebuild button at the mid-top of the editor). A scene without AO really looks too different and less live than a scene with AO. You can check the difference between the following two images; while the first has the AO disabled, the second one has it enabled (check the edges' and corners' indirect shadowing):

That's how it will look when...