Preface
U
NREAL Engine is a complete suite of tools develope d by Epic Games, Inc. for
game development, simulation, and visualization. The Unreal technology has
been one of the most widely used game engines in the game development industry,
real-time film, and visua lization, th anks to its powerful components includ ing the
graphics rendering engine, animation and physics engine, Cascad e Particle System,
and many more state-of-the-art technologies.
A HISTORY OF UNREAL TECHNOLOGY
Established in 1991, Epic Ga mes, Inc. has be en a pioneer in cuttin g-edge gaming
technolo gies with their trademark Unreal Engine game engine. The Engine was used
in Epic Game s’ b lockbuster “Unrea l,” which was released in 1998. Un real had an
incredible set of modular pieces sewn together behind the scenes of the Unreal game
that made possible such ama zing computer generated graphics, vast outdoor environ-
ments, and even A rtificial Intelligence.
Unreal tec hnology also had another amazing component to it th at gave gamers,
who were interested in doing a little programming, a taste of what they can ac hieve by
modify ing existing games. Unr ealScript, a programming languag e similar to C/C++,
was the tool that gave mod makers the ability to interact with the engine and make
their own gameplay.
In response to the great reception of the Unreal Engine, Epic Games launched
the Unreal Developer Network (UDN). The UDN was a bustling online hub for Un-
real Engine users, programmers, and developers, to find up-to-date information and
documentation about different features of the game engine and step-by-step tutorials
on utilizing this engine to crea te projects ranging from level design to multiplayer
networked games.
By 2 006, Epic Games created Un real Engine 3 (UE3), one the most advanced
game engines in the world, and the te chnology be hind blockbuster games such as
Gears of War (2006), Unreal Tournament III (2007), Gea rs of War 2 (2008), and of
course Borderlands 2 (2012) and XCOM:Enemy Unknown (2012). Epic games also
made the technology behind Unrea l Engine 3 available to inde pendent develo pers
and students for free, in the form of Unreal Development Kit (UDK). UDK included
all of the Unreal Engine 3’s features and com ponents except the en gine source code
in C++; which was only available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees. However, UDK
developers still had access to the UnrealScript and were able to develop games and
content similar to what was achievable b y the full Unreal Engine 3.
xxxi
xxxii Preface
UNREAL ENGINE 4
As game developers created fantastic games with the amazing and powerful Unreal
Engine 3 (UE3) an d UDK, the good folks at Epic Games did not stop. In April 201 4,
Epic Games released yet another masterpiece – the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) and the
subject of this book. The engine is a complete suite of game development tools which
enable game developers to create a variety of different games from 2D side scroller
and mobile games to hig h-end visua lization, films and even simulation content.
Epic Games has also pio neered a drastically different lice nsing model for the Un-
real Engine 4 , which brings th is amaz ing technology to all game developers, from
top-notch studios to In die developers, and even to students. The Unreal Engine 4
is licensed with a sub scription model. Developers may obtain the license at an in-
credibly affordable monthly subscription of $19 + 5% of gross revenue
1
. M oreover,
Epic Games commitment to support students and schools has made Unreal En gine
4 available to colleges and universities free of charge for academic a nd educational
purposes and for providing students with free licenses.
The license gives access to all features of Unreal Engine 4, including the entire
engine’s source code in C++, UE4’s community network, documentation and the
Unreal Marketplace. This new model of access as well as Epic ’s history of bring-
ing d evelopers together as a community will make Unreal Engine one of the most
prevalent game development technologies for the years to co me.
WHAT IS COVERED IN THIS BOOK?
As the name suggests, this book is about Unreal Technology and its use in developing
games and other simulation content. The focus of this book is on the latest version of
the Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). UE4 is comprised of several advanced
tools and technologies. These technologies control many aspects of games; and be-
cause of their immense power may be utilized in other areas such as visualizatio n,
simulation, and even virtual reality.
UE4 includes an advanced graphic rendering engine which is built on a new shad-
ing/rendering model called Physically Based Shading. Other fascinating compone nts
of UE4 include, the Cascade Particle Editing system, Physics and Animation engines,
Artificial Intelligence, and much more. Because of the sheer number of tools and
components that make up the fabrics of UE4, it is quite difficult to cover all of it in
one book.
In this book, we will cover Unreal Engine components that are quite fundamental
in game develo pment and will learn a bout the following features in UE4:
Material Pipeline
UE4 has introduced a brand new material pipeline. The n ew materials in UE4 are
called Physically Based Mate rials. This n ew rendering mechanism makes the cre-
1
For information about details, please refer to the Unreal Engine 4’s End User License A greement
(EULA) at Unreal E ngine Website.
Preface xxxiii
ation of materia ls in UE4 quite intuitive, since the traditional material features such
as diffuse, specular, and ambient components are replaced by physical features such
as base color, roughness, m etallic, etc .
We w ill cover UE4’s materials and material pipeline in two chapters:
Chapter 4: Introduces you to the UE4’s new material pipeline and covers a
great p ortion of this new rendering tool. There are step-by-step tuto -
rials designed to give you hands-on experience with creating materi-
als in UE4 to achieve quite realistic imagery and great visuals.
Chapter 5: Gives you an intro duction to more advanced tools and features
in the UE4’s new material pipeline, covering features such as new
shading models, laye red materials, and material instancin g.
Blueprint Scripting System
Blueprint visual scripting to ol is another bran d new feature introduced in UE4. It
combine s the Kismet’s
2
ease of use, with the flexibility an d power of UnrealScript
3
.
There is more to the Blueprint Scripting tool than just combining the best of these two
worlds! Blueprints are actually pieces of co de, and as suc h are incredibly modular
and powerful. Gone are the days of having to script each aspec t of your game into an
intertwined network of Kismet sequenc es and many lines of UnrealScr ipt code. You
can create blueprint assets from almost anything in UE4, and use them anywhere you
wish in UE 4, even in other UE4 projects!
In this book we will cover blueprints in two ch apters:
Chapter 3: Introduces you to UE4’s new Blueprint system and gives you an
overview of what can be a chieved with this powerful c omponent
of UE 4. I t has been said, of the UE4 Blueprints, that a group of
artists can create a fully functional game w ithout touching a single
line of code. In fact Blueprints are so powerful th at you can create
multiplayer game s with them without the need to progra m in the
engine’s native language (C++). This power is thanks to the fact that
blueprints are essentially code, wrapped in efficient visual modules
for non-programmers to implement logic.
Chapter 8: Gets y ou even deeper in programm ing w ith UE4 Blueprints, intro-
ducing concepts such as casting, blueprint commun ic ations, event
dispatchers, and so on. This chapter guides you through build ing a
game with a simple HUD system, Save/Load game features, and a
scoreboard to keep track of players’ highest scores.
2
Kismet was the Visual Scripting tool in UE3.
3
UnrealScript was a code based scripting language for UE3.
xxxiv Preface
CASCADE PARTICLE SYSTEMS
Although this comp onent of UE4 seems to have go ne through the least amount of
change over the Cascade in UE 3, it is as powerful as other UE4 components. You can
create many amazing visual effects in Cascade including CPU particles, GPU-based
particles, Mesh-based particles, and Beam and Ribbon p articles. Cascade works quite
closely with your other engine compone nts including the Blueprint system and UE4
Materials to unleash its power in creating a sto nishing effects.
We cover the Cascade Particle system in one of the chapters in this book:
Chapter 6: Introduces you to UE4 ’s Cascade Par ticle Editing system. In this
chapter we cover the basics of creating particle effect in Cascade.
Several step-by-step tutorials are designed to give you hands-on ex-
perience with particle systems and visu al effects in Cascade. You
will learn to create spark s, snow, rain and fire. By combining these
effects, you should be able to create many more complicated and
astoundin g visual effects in Cascad e.
Landscapes
Another new feature introduced in UE 4, Landscapes are the equivalent to Terrains
in UE 3. The new Landscape editing tool in UE 4 is quite powerful and allows for
layering m aterials into landscape layers to seamlessly blend different landscape fea-
tures such as, grass, sand, snow, rock and so on. Moreover, land scape materials can
be desig ned in the UE4’s Mater ia l Editor to utilize fading, which in turn can work
with the foliage instancing a nd clu ster ing feature s of the landscape system. This en-
ables the engine to efficiently and smoothly fade foliage actors in a nd out of view
based on their distance to the camera for improved performance.
Another new feature in UE4’s landscape system is the introduction of spline tools.
Splines are two-dimensional actors that can represent linear fea tures in your land-
scape such as rivers, roads, tr ails, etc. You can assign static meshes to the landscape
splines to easily implement such linear features in your landscape. Moreover, land-
scape splines have the ability to interact with your landscape geo metry to deform the
shape of the landscape to their path. This feature w ill be a gr eat time saver when you
are working with vast ou tdoor environments.
Landscapes and Landscape tools are covered in one of the chapters in this book :
Chapter 7: Introduces you to UE4 ’s Landscapes and Landscape Editing sys-
tem. In th is chapter we cover all aspec ts of creating vast outdoor
envir onments. Several step-by-step tutorials are designed to give
you hands-on experience with Landscapes, starting from landscape
creation and sculpting, to instancing and clustering, to landscap e
splines.
Preface xxxv
Project Templates
To showcase th e power and flexibility of UE4, the en gine comes with a large n umber
of pre-built game templates for the developers to adopt. These templates include tra-
ditional gam es you would expect from Unreal Engine such as Fir st Person Sh ooters
and Third Person Shooters, to 2D mobile games, Side Scrollers, and even a Puzzle
game template.
We w ill cover the project templates in one of the chapters in this book:
Chapter 1: Introduces you to the game templates available in UE4. We will
cover some o f the most widely used ones and give you a n overview
of what features are built in, and how yo u can utilize these templates
in yo ur own games. It will save you a tremendous amount of time
to start you r game from one of the templates on which your ga me
mechanics are built and work your way up to modifying the template
to su it your needs.
HOW IS THE BOOK STRUCTURED?
The book is structured in thre e sections. Section I covers the basics of game develop-
ment in Unreal Engine 4. Section II de lves deeper into the tools and techniques avail-
able in UE4 for the creation of com plex visual features. Fina lly, Section III presents
more advanced fea tures in UE4 and walks you through developing two games, a first
person shooter with a basic HUD system and scoreboa rd, and a top-down sho oter
with e nemy bots whose behavior is controlled by Artificial In te lligence.
SECTION I – UNREAL TECHNOLOGY BASICS: INTRODUCTORY DE-
VELOPMENT TECHNIQUES
We will start with giving you an overview of the UE4 p roject templates and the main
features ea ch provides in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 will then present a quick tour of UE4,
while going over different stages of level design, starting from the brush phase all
the way to the polish phase – all done in UE4. We will start looking at the Unreal
Engine Blueprint Visual Scripting too ls in Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 will give you
a thorou gh experience with the new Material pipeline in UE4.
SECTION II – MAKING GAME WORLDS STAND OUT: INTERMEDI-
ATE DEVELOPMENT CONCEPTS
This section starts where the previous section left off – i.e., Unreal Materials. Chap-
ter 5 presents advanced topics in the new UE4 material pipeline, including layered
materials, different shading models, and so on. These concepts will tie in, when you
are introduced to UE4’s Cascade and Particle Systems in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 will
complete your tour of visual components of UE4 by introducing you to the new
Landscape tools. You will also lear n to create advanced materials and other visual
features such as water and post process effects in this chapter.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.