Optimizing Materials for Mobile Platforms

Moving away from the most powerful gaming and computing platforms means that we, as developers, have to adjust to less capable devices, and demanding elements, such as shaders, need to be tweaked in order to maintain performance.

In this chapter, we will take a look at how to bring our materials into a mobile environment and how to optimize them, using many of the built-in tools provided by Unreal.

In particular, we will learn about the following topics in this chapter:

• Increasing performance through customized UVs
• Creating materials for mobile platforms
• Using the forward shading renderer for VR
• Optimizing materials through texture atlases
• Baking a complex material into a simpler texture
• Combining multiple meshes with the HLOD tool
• Applying general material optimization techniques

Here’s a sneak peek at what we will be creating:

Figure 6.1 – A look at some...