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Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook
Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook: Over 70 recipes for mastering post-processing effects and advanced shading techniques

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Profile Icon Brais Brenlla Ramos Profile Icon John P. Doran
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Brais Brenlla Ramos Profile Icon John P. Doran
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$69.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.6 (5 Ratings)
Paperback May 2019 524 pages 1st Edition
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$49.99 $55.99
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Unreal Engine 4 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Chapter 1. Physically Based Rendering

Welcome to the first chapter of the book! In the next few pages, we are going to start looking at how to set up a scene in Unreal for visualization purposes—we want to make sure that we nail this first part down before we move any further. Beginner or advanced, no matter what type of user you are, we'll need to make sure to take a look at some of the most critical elements that can make or break a scene in Unreal. Things like taking advantage of the right type of lighting, knowing where to look for the most common material parameters, or learning to measure the impact in performance that the shaders have are vital in any project. With that in mind, we are going to be learning about the following topics:

  • Setting up a studio scene
  • Working inside the material editor
  • Our first physically based material
  • Creating some simple glass with the translucent blend mode
  • Lighting our scene with image-based lighting
  • Checking the cost of our materials

Introduction


Welcome to this in-depth journey through the material creation process in Unreal Engine 4! I think you are going to have a great time if you are excited about the possibilities that this game engine brings to the table in terms of state-of-the-art rendering techniques. And by state-of-the-art I mean a powerful and robust rendering pipeline, where both photorealistic and stylized game art are possible without changing to a different development suite.

The fact that such a flexible system is in place is courtesy of the continuous advances over the years in the field of real-time rendering. We've journeyed from the 2D era into the 3D era, from sprites and flat images to the rendering of polygons and whole worlds.

Each of these changes happened thanks to a combination of new and more powerful hardware as well as increasingly intelligent rendering pipelines and techniques. One of the latest improvements that we can talk about is what we are going to be covering throughout this book—the PBR workflow.

And what does PBR stand for? That would be Physically Based Rendering—a particular method that takes into account how light behaves when it comes into contact with 3D objects. In order to represent materials placed in a 3D environment, artists need to specify certain properties for each of the materials that they create—such as what the underlying color should be, how much light they reflect, or how defined those reflections are.

This is significant change from previous workflows, where light propagation and its simulation wasn't taken into account in a realistic way. This meant, for example, that materials couldn't be replicated under different lighting conditions—having, for instance, a night and a day scene using the same assets resulted in them looking substantially different. An artist would therefore need to create different sets of textures or adjust the materials to make them look right for each particular scenario they might be in.

This has changed with the recent introduction of the PBR workflow. Newer game engines, such as Unreal Engine 4, have made this rendering approach their quasi default one—and I say quasi as they also allow for older rendering methods to be thrown into the mix in order to give artists more freedom. Materials are coherent under different lighting settings, and knowing how to create content under this pipeline ensures usability under a lot of different circumstances.

However, PBR is not a universally defined convention as far as its implementation goes. This means that how things work under the hood varies across the different rendering engines. The exact implementation that Epic has chosen for their Unreal Engine platform is different from that of other third-party software creators. Furthermore, PBR workflows in real-time applications are slightly different to offline renderers, as efficiency and speed are a must in this industry and things have to be adapted consequently. What we need to take away from these facts is that a physically based approach to rendering has huge advantages (as well as some limitations) that we as artists need to be aware of if we are to use the engine to its full potential.

We conceived the present book with that goal in mind. We aim to present you with a series of recipes that tackle many different functionalities within Unreal, structured in a way where each unit can be read independently from the rest. In order to do so, we'll be taking a look in the following pages at how to get a hold of the engine and how to set up a basic scene, which we'll use to visualize our projects.

Setting up a studio scene


In this first recipe, we are going to create a basic scene that we'll be able to use as our background level throughout this course. This initial step is here just so we can go over the basics of the engine and get familiar with different useful websites from where we can download multiple assets.

Getting ready

Before we actually start creating our basic studio scene, we will need to download Unreal Engine 4. I've started writing this book with version 4.20.3, but don't hesitate to use the latest version at the time of reading. 

Here's how you can download it:

  1. Get the Epic Games Launcher from the engine's website, https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog, and follow the installation procedure indicated there.
  2. Once installed, download the latest version of the engine. We can do so by navigating to the UNREAL ENGINE section of the launcher, in the tab named Library. In there, we'll be able to see a + icon (1), which lets us download whichever version of Unreal we want. Once we've downloaded it, launch it (2) so we can get started:

And that's all you need! We now have everything required to get started in Unreal Engine 4. How cool is that? A whole new game engine at our fingertips, completely free, and with a variety of tools within it that would take years to learn and master. It really is a thing of wonder! Next up, we are going to start learning about one of those tools—the materials. And in order to do so, let's start by creating our first project!

How to do it...

Let's start by launching the engine that we have just installed and creating a new project by taking the following steps:

  1. Create a New Project—give it a name and select the folder where you want it to live. Just as a reference, as shown in the following screenshot, I've decided to start off with a blank blueprint-based project, but it doesn't really matter what we decide to initially include. Nothing special so far! You can choose to add the Starter Content if you want, as it comes with several useful resources that we can use later on:

Note

Additionally, you can get more free resources from other different places. You can check the Learn tab within the Epic Games Launcher to see what freely available examples you can get a hold of, or check the community section to see if there is any new cool content.

Epic has recently collaborated with multiple content creators to make a multitude of different assets available to anyone using Unreal, and you can check them out at the following website: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/new-free-content-coming-to-the-unreal-engine-marketplace?utm_source=launcher&utm_medium=chromium&utm_term=forum&utm_content=FreeContent&utm_campaign=communitytab.

  1. The first thing that we need to do once the editor loads is to go to File | Save Current As, just to make sure that the changes we are about to implement get saved. Otherwise, we would just be working on the default untitled map, which wouldn't store any of the changes that we are about to make!
  2. Once that's done, we are now ready to start spicing things up. Erase everything from the world outliner—we are not going to be using any of that for our studio scene. Your scene and the world outliner should look something like this: 
  1. If you haven't done so before, it is now time to include the Starter Content. Don't worry if you didn't do it at first! I didn't say it was mandatory only to be able to look at how to include it after starting a new project—just navigate to the content browser and look for the Add New option in the upper left corner. Select the first available option in there, named Add feature or Content Pack, as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. With that included, we can see that the Starter Content includes a blueprint that can be quite useful for setting up the lighting in our scene. You can look for this inside of the Content Browser | Starter Content | Blueprints folder, and it's named BP_ Light Studio. Select it and drag it into the scene we have previously created.

The asset called BP_Light Studio is a blueprint that Epic Games has already created for us. It includes several lighting settings that will make our lives easier—instead of having to set up multiple lights and assign them different values, it automates all of that work for us so we just have to choose how we want our scene to look. Making a simple studio scene will be something very easy to do this way.

Retaining that level of control over which lights are placed and how we do that is, of course, very important, and something that we'll do later in the book, but for now this is a very powerful tool that we will use.

  1. With the BP_ Light Studio placed in our scene, we can start tweaking its default values just so we can use it as a lighting studio setup. Select the blueprint from the world outliner and let's tweak several settings.
  2. The first one we can look at is the HDRi tab inside the details panel for the BP_ Light Studio. HDRi is short for High Dynamic Range imaging, which is a type of texture that stores the lighting information from the place at which the photo was taken. Using that data as a type of light in 3D scenes is a very powerful technique, which makes our environments look more natural and real:
  1. However, useful HDRi might be, this lighting method is turned off by default, so make sure to tick the Use HDRi checkbox. That will make the texture placed in the HDRi Cubemap slot light the scene. Feel free to use any other ones you might have or download one to use throughout the project!

HDRi images are very useful for 3D artists, even though they can be tricky to create as it is usually a lengthy process. There are many websites from which you can buy them, but I like the following one that gives you free access to some very useful ones: http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html.

We will be using the one called Alexs Apartment, which is quite useful for interior visualization.

  1. You can now untick the Use Light Sun and the Use Atmosphere option found under the Sun and the Atmosphere section of the BP_LightStudio blueprint if you use an HDRi image. As we said earlier, this type of picture stores lighting information, which renders the use of other lights sometimes optional.
  2. Once you've done that, let's create a basic plane on which we can use to lay out our objects. Dragging a plane into the scene from the Modes panel will do the job: Modes | Basic category | Plane.
  3. Let's assign our newly placed plane an interesting default material so we have something to look at—with the plane selected, scroll down to the Materials section of the details panel and change its default value to M_Wood_Pine. Said material is part of the Starter Content, so make sure you have it installed!

We should now be looking at something like the following:

With that out of the way, we can say that we've finished creating our basic studio scene. Having done that will enable us to use this level for visualization purposes, kind of like having a white canvas on which to paint. We will use this to place other models and materials as we create them, in order to correctly visualize our assets.

How it works...

There are at least two different objectives that we can complete if we follow the previous set of steps—the creation of our intro scene being the first one and the second one being getting familiar with the engine. This final task is something that will continue to happen over time—but getting our hands dirty now will have hopefully accelerated that process.

Something that could also speed that up even more is a review process of what we've just done. Not only will we learn things potentially faster, but knowing why we do the things the way we do them will help us cement the knowledge we acquire—so expect to see a How it works... section after each recipe we tackle! As the first ever example of the aforementioned section, we'll briefly go over what we have just done before in order to understand how things work in Unreal.

The first step we've taken was to actually create the Unreal Engine project on which we'll be working throughout this book. We've then added the assets present in the Starter Content package that Epic Games supplies, as it contains useful 3D models and materials that we can check later on as we work on other recipes. The most important bit we've done was probably the lighting setup though, as this will be the basis of some of the next recipes. This is because having a light source is vital to visualizing the different assets that we create or add to the scene. Lighting is something that we'll explore more in some of the next recipes, but the method we've chosen in this one is a very cool technique that you can use in your own projects. We are using an asset that Unreal calls a blueprint, something that allows you to use the engine's visual scripting language to create different functionalities within the game engine without using C++ code. This is extremely useful, as you can program different behaviors across multiple types of actors to use to your advantage—turning a light on and off, opening a door, creating triggers to fire certain events, and so on. We'll explore them more as we go along, but at the moment we are just using an already available one to specify the lighting effects we want to have in our scene. This is in itself a good example of what a blueprint can do, as it allows us to set up multiple different components without having to specify each one of them individually—such as the HDRi image, the sun position, and others that you can see if you look at the Details panel. 

Working inside the material editor


Let's get started with the material editor! This is the place where the magic will happen and also where we'll spend most of our time during this cookbook. Better get well acquainted with it then! As with everything inside Unreal, you'll be able to see that this space for creating materials is a very flexible one—full of customizable panels, rearrangeable windows, and expandable areas. You can place them however you want!

Because of its modular nature, some of the initial questions we need to tackle are the following ones: how do we start creating materials and where do we look for the most commonly used parameters? Having different panels means having to look for different functionalities in each of them, so we'll need to know how to find our way around the editor. We won't stop there though—the editor is packed with plenty of useful little tools that will make our jobs as material creators that much easier, and knowing where they live is one of the first mandatory steps.

So, without further ado, let's use the project we have already set up in the previous recipe as our starting point and let's start creating our first material!

Getting ready

There's not much we need to do at this point—all thanks to having previously created the basic blank project. That's the reason we created it in the first place, so we can start working on our materials straight away. Having set up the studio scene is all we need at this point.

In spite of this, don't feel obliged to use the level we created in the first recipe. Any other one will do, as long as there are some lights in it that help you visualize your world. That's the advantage of the PBR workflow, that whatever we create following its principles will work across different lighting scenarios. Let's jump right in!

How to do it...

It's now time to take a look at how the material editor works, at the same time as we create our first material. This editor includes many different tools and functionalities within it, so there are plenty of things to take a look at!

Note

Remember that you can bring the material editor up by just creating a new material and double-clicking on it.

The first important thing we will be doing is to actually create a material. Of course, this is a very trivial action and there's not much to explain—just right-click anywhere on the content browser and select the Create Basic Asset | Material option. What is important is knowing how to name and organize our contents. Even though keeping the Content Browser organized is not the main goal of this chapter, I didn't want to pass up on the opportunity to briefly talk about that.

One good way of keeping things tidy is to organize the folder structure in categories (Materials, Characters, Weapons, Environment...) and naming the different assets using Unreal's recommended syntax. You can find more about that on several discussion forums or on Epic Games' wiki:

The second important thing we want to be doing is to make sure that the layout we are looking at is the default one, just so that the images we will be including later on match what you'll be seeing in your monitor. To do that, go to Window | Reset Layout, as shown in the following screenshot:

Remember that resetting the layout to its default state can still make things not look perfectly equal between your screen and mine—that's because settings such as the screen resolution or its aspect ratio can hide panels or make them imperceptibly small. Feel free to move things around until you reach a layout that works for you!

Now that we've made sure that we are looking at the same screen, let's turn our attention to the material editor itself and the different parts that constitute it. By default, this is what we should be looking at:

  • The first part of the material editor is the Toolbar, a common section that you'll find in many other places within the engine. It lets you save your progress or apply any changes that you've made to your materials amongst other things.
  • The second panel is the Viewport, where we'll be able to see what our material looks like. You can rotate the view, zoom in or out, and change the lighting setup of that window.
  • The Details panel (3) is a very useful one, for here is where we can start to define the properties of the materials that we want to create. Its contents vary depending on what is selected in the main graph editor (the panel numbered 6).
  • The Stats and the Find Results panels (4) is where you can take a look at how costly your materials are or how many textures they are using.
  • The material nodePalette (5) is a library of different nodes and functions that we'll use to modify the materials we create.
  • The main graph editor (6) is where the action happens, and where most of the functionality that you want to include in your materials needs to be visually scripted.

Now that we've taken a look at the different parts that make up the material editor in Unreal, we can start creating our own first simple material—a plastic. I find plastics to be a very straightforward type—even though we could make them as complicated as we want to. So, let's explore how we would go about at creating it:

  1. Take a look at the main graph. By default, every time you create a new material, you should be looking at a central main node. You will see multiple pins, which are the elements where we want to connect the different elements we will be creating.
  2. Right-click on the main graph, preferably to the left of the main material node, and start typing constant. As you start to write, notice how the auto-completion system starts to show several options: Constant, Constant2VectorConstant3Vector, and so on. Select Constant3Vector, as shown in the following screenshot:
  1. Having chosen that option, you will be able to see that a new node has now appeared. You can now connect it to the Base Color of the material node. If you are on the constant node, take a look at the Details panel and you'll be able to see that there are a couple settings that you can tweak. Since we want to move away from the default blackish appearance that the material now has, click on the black rectangle to the right of where it says Constant and use the color wheel to change its current value. I'm going to go with orange:

Note

There's more to the base color property than meets the eye! Apart from the different options that are available to select a color, you might be interested to know that the actual value that gets connected to the material slot matters beyond the color choice. Certain materials have a measured intensity to them, and you can check that out on the following website: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased.

It's not something that you should concern yourself with at this stage, but can come in handy in the future!

At the moment, we can see that we have managed to modify the color of our material. We can now change how sharp the reflections are, as we want to go for a plastic look. In order to do so, we need to modify the Roughness parameter with another different constant. Instead of right-clicking and typing, let's choose it from the palette menu instead.

  1. Navigate to the Palette section, and look for the Constant category. We want to select the first option in there, aptly named like this subsection itself. Alternatively, you can type its name in the search box at the top of the panel:
  1. A new, smaller node should have now appeared. Unlike the previous one, we don't have the option to select a color—we need to type in a value. Let's go with something low, about 0.2. Connect it to the Roughness pin.

If you look at the preview viewport, you will notice that the appearance of the material has now changed. It looks like the reflections from the environment are much sharper than before. This is happening thanks to the previously created constant pin, which, using a value closer to 0 (or black), makes the reflections stand out that much more. Whiter values decrease the sharpness of those reflections or, in other words, make the surface appear much more rough.

Having done so, we are now in a position where we can finally apply this material to a model inside of our scene. Let's go back to the main level and look at the Modes panel, particularly to the Basic section. Drag and drop a cube into the main level, and assign it the following values inside of the Details panel just so we are looking at the same:

Reducing the size of the cube will make it fit better into our scene. Now head over to the Materials section of the Details panel, and click on the drop-down menu. Look for the newly created material and assign it to our cube. Finally, click on the Build icon located on the toolbar as follows:

And there it is! We now have our material applied to a simple model, being displayed on the scene we had previously created. Even though this has served as a small introduction to a much bigger world, we've now gone over most of the panels and tools that we'll be using in the material editor. See you in the next recipe!

How it works...

We've used the present recipe to learn about the material editor and we've also created our first material. Knowing what each section does within the editor will help a lot in the immediate future, as what we've just done is but a prelude to our real target—creating a physically based material. Now we are in a much better position to tackle that goal, so let's look at it in the next recipe!

Before moving on though, let's check the nodes that we have used to create this simple material. From an artist's point of view, the names that the engine has given to something like a color value or a grayscale value can seem a bit confusing. It might be difficult to establish a connection between the name of the Constant3Vector node and our idea of a color. But there is a reason for all of this!

The idea behind that naming convention is that these nodes can be used beyond the color values we have just assigned them. At the end of the day, a simple constant can be used in many different scenarios—such as depicting a grayscale value, using it as a brightness multiplier, or as a parameter inside a material function. Don't worry if you haven't seen these other uses yet, we will—the point is, the names that these nodes were given tell us that there are more uses beyond the ones we've seen.

With that in mind, it might be better to think of those elements we've been using in more mathematical terms. For instance, think of a color as an Red Green Blue (RGB) value, which is what we are defining with that previous Constant3Vector node. If you want to use an RGB value alongside an alpha one, why not use the Constant4Vector, which allows for a fourth input? Even though we are at a very early stage, it is always good to familiarize ourselves with the different expressions the engine uses.

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Key benefits

  • Create stunning visual effects for 3D games and high-quality graphics
  • Design efficient Shaders for mobile platforms without sacrificing their realism
  • Discover what goes into the structure of Shaders and why lighting works the way it does

Description

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game engine, one which has seen a recent boost in widespread adoption thanks to its ease of use and the powerful rendering pipeline that it packs. Seeing as how it's relatively easy to create stunning presentations and visuals, Unreal has quickly become a strong contender in industries where this kind of software had been previously denied entry. With that in mind, this book aims to help you get the most out of Unreal Engine 4 - from creating awe-inspiring graphics to delivering optimized experiences to your users. This is possible thanks to a mixture of hands-on experience with real materials and the theory behind them. You will immediately know how to create that material that you want to display, and you'll also end up with the knowledge that will let you know how to control it. All of this will be done without losing sight of two key components of any real-time application - optimization, and efficiency. The materials that you create will be light and efficient, and they will vary depending on your target platform. You'll know which techniques can be used in any kind of device and which ones should be kept to high-end machines, giving you the confidence to tackle any material-related task that you can imagine. Hop onboard and discover how!

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers who want to create their first Shaders in Unreal Engine 4 or wish to take their game to a whole new level by adding professional post-processing effects. A solid understanding of Unreal is required to get the most from this book.

What you will learn

  • Master Unreal Engine s rendering pipeline for developing real-time graphics
  • Use physically based rendering (PBR) for building materials and lighting solutions
  • Build optimized materials for games targeting multiple platforms
  • Understand Unreal Engine s node and functions for creating desirable effects
  • Design and build production-ready shaders
  • Explore Unreal Engine s Material Editor for building complex materials and textures
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Physically Based Rendering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Post-Processing Effects Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Opaque Materials and Texture Mapping Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Translucent Materials and More Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Beyond Traditional Material Uses Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Advanced Material Techniques Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Using Material Instances Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Mobile Shaders and Material Optimization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Some Extra Useful Nodes Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Chris Jul 28, 2020
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I'm about halfway through the book, but I wanted to write a review while it was still fresh in my mind.One of the other reviews is correct: this book would be useless if you didn't have a computer nearby. It would probably have been possible to design in such a way as to make it readable as a standalone book if it included more complete graph photos, and indeed, consisted mostly of photos. For the print version, I'm sure this would up the cost of the book drastically.To get maximum value from the book, you should download the included assets and work along with the book. You can either go step-by-step from the starting point (which the authors conveniently create for each section of each chapter), or open the completed files for that chapter, which is the final result of taking all of the steps in the chapter and applying them. This gives you some versatility in how you want to work alongside the book. In the beginning, I was meticulously taking every step myself, but as the material graphs grew larger, I found it easier to open the finished file and deconstruct each element as the book describes them.The included assets, scenes, and materials are extremely high quality. It's nice to know I'm breaking down something that is professional quality.A couple of other caveats: I am using the digital version from the publisher's site. I glanced at the paperback and kindle versions scans, and they truly look horrible. Packt needs to get its stuff together or it's going to ruin its reputation on here.Another caveat: I am a professional programmer but am otherwise a beginner with gaming / 3D development. I got serious about Unreal a few weeks ago and have been obsessively going through tutorials. To get the most use out of this book, I would also recommend you get to the point of feeling comfortable with Unreal and the basics of materials and textures.Overall, I recommend this book if the above circumstances fit yours. If you're looking for something that can be read without a computer, or don't plan on taking advantage of the well-constructed sample files, you'll find this useless.
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AJ Aug 24, 2022
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
In my opinion, one of the most important things in game development is making it look nice. This booked helped with that. I’m not great with post processing but this book made me more comfortable with it. Truly appreciate it!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Taranis Sep 04, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
The majority of the book is about how to do something, not why it works that way with UE. It is not useful for people without solid foundation in UE shaders. The organisation of the content is poor, with little consideration about progression. A lot of the recipes are not so useful in real project.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
pAckmAn4000 Aug 23, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
It's good for those who learn UE4. It gives good overview of UE4 capabilities in PBR, materials and shaders. Though, the reason for 3 stars is the quality of printing. Normally it wouldn't bother me as long as I can read the text. But here they wrote a book about visual effects and printed it in greyscale. Seriously? It's really hard to see the difference between metallic and matt material on a picture in this book, let alone many much subtle details.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Kristóf Morva Nov 07, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
I always wanted to gain some deeper knowledge in shaders, both in general and in Unreal Engine. Sadly, this book does not provide it, for multiple reasons.The core issue is, although it does describe how to set up specific materials, it does not explain all the nodes that were used to achieve it and the reason they were used; so although you can set up some cool effects that are described here, it does not teach you how to actually do your own materials.I don't even understand who is the target of this book. I generally read books on buses, airplane, etc, whenever I can't have my laptop. However, more than half of this book only covers how to set up the project, which material sub-graph should be copied to which part and which links should be connected. But like sometimes in 70+ steps! "42. Create a new Text Coord, copy the D subgraph after it, and connect them". And 70 of it. Now, if I was at my computer, reading a list of these would be the last thing I'd do; a YouTube tutorial is much more interactive, has a comment section for discussion, and much easier to follow.This way, this book is not readable if you're not at your computer, but why would you read it if you're at your computer when there are much better alternative interactive resources available.Let's say you ignore the parts where there are 5 pages of raw text, which describe how to connect the graphs and create the nodes, so that you can just look at the final graph and an explanation of why and how things happen. Sadly, you can't do that either.First of all, the full graph is not always included, instead, you get something like: "For the full graph, look in the material asset". Once again it's proven that you can't read it without a computer at hand.Secondly, although each recipe is broken into different sections, those sections are totally useless. Some reasoning and explanation are in the section of building the material (so you have to read the material constructing even if you're on an airplane and it's totally irrelevant), and the others are semi-randomly spread through the last 2 parts of each recipe which do not have any obvious separation between each other.I'm pretty sure the guys who wrote it are professionals, and there are surely a few things you can learn from it. But it's extremely high-level, not well organized at all, and just in general, not an easy nor a good read.That's just my opinion tho, you might still like it.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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