Preface

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook aims to take you on a journey of creation and discovery within the Unreal Engine 4 game engine. As the title of the book implies, we'll travel hand in hand to every corner of the engine, performing actions that affect the visuals of our games and apps. We'll do so in an orderly way, starting from the very beginning by covering fundamental topics that will stay with us throughout the rest of the book. Each chapter that follows will expand upon that base, allowing for a gentle progression curve that will allow almost any user to follow along. In spite of that, each entry – or recipe – has been also conceived as an independent unit, letting you tackle it separately from the others in case you are already proficient with the other topics.

We'll start by covering the core concepts behind Unreal Engine's rendering pipeline, such as its physically based rendering approach and post-processing effects. With solid foundational knowledge about those two topics, we'll expand upon them and study different types of materials: opaque ones, translucent ones, and more, such as the different subsurface materials and other shading models. We'll also explore several advanced material creation techniques and tricks that the engine lets us use to create multiple different effects—from mixing materials and blueprints, to instancing and material optimization. There's a whole lot we are going to be covering!

Upon finishing this book, you will have a thorough knowledge about many different material concepts and techniques, both from a practical and a theoretical point of view. You'll be able to use these newly learned concepts in any games, apps, or personal projects that you tackle, with the absolute confidence that you are doing it right. With that said, let's get to it!