Learn the principles of lighting and rendering in the Unreal Engine
Key Features
- Get acquainted with the concepts of lighting and rendering specific to Unreal
- Use new features such as Realistic Rendering and Foliage Shading to breathe new life into your projects
- A fast-paced guide to help you learn lighting and rendering concepts in Unreal
Book Description
Unreal Engine is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games. Developers have the opportunity to build cross-platform mobile and desktop games from scratch. Unreal Engine enables users to create high quality games that focus on individual complexities of game development.
This book provides you with the skills required to apply a high level of visual appeal to your games without compromising on performance.
Starting with an introduction to the rendering system, you will learn to create different types of materials using the Material Editor. You will then create a particle system based on Cascade editor to create mind-blowing visual effects.
Moving on, you will learn the concept of lights in Unreal and different types of dynamic/real-time lights, along with a number of powerful post processing effects. Next, you will learn to improve rendering performance, keeping in mind the rendering limitations for different platforms.
At the end of the book, we will discuss the scalability settings menu, and how to add realistic fog effects based on the requirements of your game or level.
What you will learn
- Use features such as realistic Rendering and Foliage Shading to create high quality output
- Create and edit your materials using the Material Editor
- Use Cascade's particle editor to create modular particle-based effects using emitters
- Explore Unreal's GPU Visualizer
- Tweak the overall look and feel of your scene with post-process effects
- Create charts to get stat unit times over a long period of time
- Use scalability settings to maintain performance for your games on different platforms and hardware
Muhammad A.Moniem started in the industry at a very early age. He taught himself everything related to the game development process even before he joined college. After being a software engineer, he started to teach himself the art of game design and game art techniques. As a self-taught person, he was able to find his way into the industry very easily, which led him to be hired for big, medium, and small companies, titles, and teams. Throughout his career, he was able to contribute as a full-time or part-time employee or freelancer to games for a wide range of platforms, including Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, PS4, Xbox One, and OUYA. He has also worked with technologies, such as VR, AR, and Kinect. Finally, he was able to establish his own one-person game company/team as a part-time independent developer. A lot of his indie games got recognition or have been finalists at international indie game events, such as IGF, Indie Showcase, IGC, and Tokyo Game Show. He has written another Unreal Engine book before and he has also designed an amazing website, www.mamoniem.com. He has also worked on Learning Unreal® Engine iOS Game Development, Packt Publishing, which is available at https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/learning-unreal-engine-ios-game-development.
