Preface

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is quickly becoming the next big thing in games, visualization, and even feature films. Visualization firms, hobbyists, and professionals are eager to explore its possibilities. Unreal Engine 4 is a massive application with thousands of features, hundreds of hours of training videos, and countless tutorials, wikis, and community guides available. These resources can answer many questions about UE4, but finding what’s important for visualization can be overwhelming. Almost all the learning resources available are geared toward creating games, not visualizations.

UE4 can seem both very familiar and very alien to people who know how to create traditionally rendered content. There are many similarities that can make learning UE4 easy; other times, things are only similar in name, but in practice are very different. The wrong assumptions can cause frustration and seem insurmountable.

This book aims to act as a guide to visualization studios and individuals, filtering out the noise and presenting the most relevant information using real-world examples, solid workflows, and some tools and tricks as well. Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is quickly becoming the next big thing in games, visualization, and even feature films. Visualization firms, hobbyists, and professionals are all eager to explore its possibilities. However, Unreal Engine 4 is a massive application with thousands of features, hundreds of hours of training videos, countless tutorials, wikis, and community guides available. These resources are overwhelming and lacking focus. Almost all are geared toward creating games, not visualizations.

You should already understand how 3D rendering works at a professional level before tackling this book. Concepts like Materials, Global Illumination (GI), polygon modeling, and UV mapping should be familiar to you. I will not be covering specific visualization data workflows outside of UE4. It’s expected that you are already adept at taking the raw data provided to you and manipulating it into an organized, optimized 3D format ready for rendering. It is also assumed that you are adept at raytraced rendering techniques and terminology, such as refraction, and Fresnel falloffs should be familiar to you.

If you are interested in Blueprints, I highly recommend you have some background in scripting or programming or computer logic. Concepts like For Loops, If Statements, Variables, and variable types like Booleans, Floats, and Strings are used throughout Blueprints and UE4 in general. This book provides an overview of programming techniques in Blueprints, but it is not a programming tutorial. However, Blueprints are exceptionally user-friendly, and anyone who has experience with scripting, especially in a 3D application, will be able to jump in easily.

If you are a more advanced scripter or programmer or UI developer, you should feel right at home in Blueprints. Functions, typed variables, and object inheritance act much like any object-oriented programming language. Like any programming language and development platform, Unreal is very specific about how it does things, so you should probably take a look at the early chapters to get a better idea of what’s going on under the hood. Creating visualizations takes a combination of strong technical skills to understand the data provided, harness the available tools, and a keen artistic and design sense to master the presentation and polish that’s expected by today’s sophisticated visualization clients.

In Part I, you begin exploring UE4 from a conceptual and technical perspective—basics like installing the Launcher and the Engine, creating Projects, and understanding Level, Maps, and Assets. You’ll learn important terminology and technologies, ensuring that as you read the book and seek help elsewhere, you have a good grasp of what’s being talked about. I’ll attempt to explain how things work from a technical perspective so you can take these lessons and apply them more easily to your own brand of visualization. You will look at this material from the perspective of a V-Ray or mental ray user who is opening Unreal engine 4 for the first time and is having to face the differences between offline and real-time rendering head-on.

After you have covered the basics and have a firm understanding of what’s going on under the hood, you begin to dive into real-world examples. These are written in a more tutorial style with detailed walkthroughs. All project source files (both .MAX and UE4 project files) are available for download at www.TomShannon3D.com/UnrealForViz so you can follow along each step of the way.

Chapter 2, Working with UE4. UE4’s workflow is likely quite different than anything you as a visualization professional have used before. Learn how the major elements of UE4 function together as a whole to create, edit, and distribute interactive applications.

Chapter 3, Content Pipeline. Getting your content into UE4 can be one of the most initially confusing and challenging aspects of learning to use UE4. Learn how UE4 imports and processes 2D and 3D content from other applications and get some ideas how to integrate that into your existing pipelines.

Chapter 4, Lighting and Rendering. UE4 introduces a revolutionary physically based renderer that produces amazing results in a fraction of a second per frame. You learn to take your years of rendering know-how and apply it to UE4’s Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Lighting system.

Chapter 5, Materials. Creating rich, lifelike Materials is essential for achieving photo realism. Materials in UE4 are an integral part of the PBR workflow and are different from any material system you have previously used. Learn how Materials are constructed, how the various components of PBR work, and begin to see how Material Instances make creating Materials in UE4 interactive and fun.

Chapter 6, Blueprints. Blueprints are a revolution in scripting and game programming. You can now develop rich, cutting-edge applications without ever writing a single line of code. However, Blueprints are still a programming language, and learning the basics will enable you to jumpstart your development.

Chapter 8, Populating the World. Using the Starter Content, you explore using the Editor for the first time, placing assets into the world to become Actors, moving them, modifying them, and then placing lights to illuminate the scene.

Chapter 9, Making It Interactive with Blueprints. Build your first Blueprint classes, the Player Controller, Pawn, and Game Mode. You assign Input Mappings and program the Player Input, allowing the Player to move around the level in first-person view.

Chapter 10, Packaging and Distribution. After your project is working, it’s time to get it ready to be distributed as a standalone application. In UE4 this is called Packaging, and it creates an optimized, easy-to install and run application you can easily zip up and send off.

Chapter 12, Data Pipeline. Learn how to prepare and organize your 3D data before exporting it to FBX. You learn the differences between Architecture and Props. Then, you explore several methods for getting your data into UE4, focusing on the FBX import and export workflow.

Chapter 13, Populating the Scene. After your data is imported to UE4, it’s time to get it into your UE4 level. There’s several strategies to learn, and you’ll see several used here to get both your Architecture and props into the scene where you want them.

Chapter 14, Architectural Lighting. UE4’s Lightmass Global Illumination solution is beautiful but also a huge departure from how you’ve ever rendered a scene’s lighting before. Learn to get stunning high-dynamic range lighting for your scenes that render in a fraction of a second.

Chapter 15, Architectural Materials. Building upon the basics you learned about Materials in the first part of the book, you start to build a Master Material, programming parameters, and other shader logic to achieve a flexible, fast and beautiful set of Material instances to apply to the scene.

Chapter 16, Creating Cinematics with Sequencer. Being able to render photo-realistic animations in a fraction of a second opens a world of creative possibilities. Learn to create Sequencer animations, using Cine Cameras to achieve physically correct, filmic looks including effects like depth of field, motion blue, and vignette. Once complete, you’ll see how you can record the 90-second walkthrough to disk at a resolution of 4k and 60 frames per second in a matter of minutes.

Chapter 17, Preparing the Level for Interactivity. Collision is absolutely essential for a great interactive experience, and it’s also one of the most complex and misunderstood areas of UE4 development. Because video games require so many interactive elements, collision has been developed to be fast, but sometimes hard to setup. Learn how to easily get your level ready to walk around without falling through the floor or a wall.

Chapter 18, Intermediate Blueprints: UMG Interaction. One of the greatest powers of Interactive Visualization is the power to compare options in-context and in real-time. You learn how to setup streaming levels and then swap them at runtime using Blueprints. You expose this functionality to the Player by creating a simple User Interface authored in UMG.

Chapter 19, Advanced Blueprints: Material Switcher. If you’re really looking for a challenge, this is the chapter for you. Here you see how a production-ready material switcher Blueprint is developed. Not only does it expose advanced functionality to the Player, but also to the Level Designer (LD), allowing them to visualize the setup in-editor, creating a complete toolset that could be reused on any project.

Chapter 20, Final Thoughts. This book only scrapes the surface of the iceberg that is UE4. I hope to leave you with a good foundation to build upon and some inspiration for where to go next. In the conclusion, I will discuss where UE4 and the industries that use it are heading, and how that will affect Visualization’s future.

You will also find additional resources and links for each chapter. As UE4 is a quickly developing piece of software and I will keep information as up to date as possible.

Bold indicates new terms, and variable and parameter names

Italic indicates values that properties and parameters may be set to.