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

Brais Brenlla Ramos

John P. Doran

$69.99

3.6 (5 Ratings)

Paperback May 2019 524 pages 1st Edition

Brais Brenlla Ramos

John P. Doran

$69.99

3.6 (5 Ratings)

Paperback May 2019 524 pages 1st Edition

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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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Frequently bought together

$69.99

Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Unreal Engine

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Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine

$65.99

Total $ 179.97

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Chris Jul 28, 2020

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.

Amazon Verified review

AJ Aug 24, 2022

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!

Taranis Sep 04, 2020

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.

pAckmAn4000 Aug 23, 2019

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.

Kristóf Morva Nov 07, 2019

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.

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

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