Unreal Engine Lighting and Rendering Essentials

Learn the principles of lighting and rendering in the Unreal Engine

About This Book

• 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

Who This Book Is For

This book is meant for game developers with knowledge of Unreal Engine and a basic understanding of lighting and rendering systems in it. As a prerequisite, you need to have good knowledge of C++.

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

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

A fast-paced guide filled with hands-on examples to teach you the principles of lighting and rendering in Unreal.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. An Introduction to Lighting and Rendering
Chapter 2. Understanding the Working of Materials
Chapter 3. Cascade – a World Made of Particles
Chapter 4. Precomputed Lights
Chapter 5. Dynamic Lights Versus Performance
Chapter 6. Post Processing Effects
Chapter 7. Render Performance Debugging
Chapter 8. The Unreal Scalability Settings
Chapter 9. Adding Fog to Your Games