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

UMG as Unreal's UI system


UMG is the UI system and the framework has been used for a while now. For not a long time, Unreal used to have a UI framework called slate. Slate is still being used underneath the UMG and the whole editor UI.

While slate was a little hard to deal with as a system and was neither super-friendly nor productive, Epic took a huge step to create the UMG system.

UMG stands for Unreal Motion Graphics, and you can understand from its name that it is not only a UI solution, but also indispensable in creating tons and tons of other stuff. It is possible to produce things like ads and motion graphics with UMG and Matinee. I've seen lots of people pushing the engine boundaries and creating ads and motion graphics using the Unreal Engine, which used to be made with packages such as Adobe After Effects.

The power within UMG is not only in its great performance, there are a few points that actually make it an amazing UI system. Let's look at them:

  • UMG has its own editor, the UMG...