Chapter 1, Physically Based Rendering, starts off this book by going over the fundamental rendering concepts that Unreal relies on, as well as introducing us to the material editor.
Chapter 2, Post-Processing Effects, introduces the user to the powerful concept of post-processing in Unreal and explains the different effects that can be achieved through it.Â
Chapter 3, Opaque Materials and Texture Mapping, goes into detail about one of the most common type of materials in Unreal and the different uses that it has.
Chapter 4, Translucent Materials and More, covers one of the most exciting type of materials, the translucent ones, as well as many others, including subsurface and emissive materials.
Chapter 5, Beyond Traditional Material Uses, goes over different uses that materials can have beyond simply being applied to 3D models, including light functions, UI elements, and displaying videos.
Chapter 6, Advanced Material Techniques, talks about some of the most high-end effects that can be created within the material editor by using advanced techniques, such as parallax occlusion mapping and mesh distance fields.
Chapter 7, Using Material Instances, discusses how to use the concept of instancing to quickly make tweaks to a material instance, layer different shaders on top of each other, and affect multiple material settings at once.
Chapter 8, Mobile Shaders and Material Optimization, goes over various ways to optimize your materials to make them more performant on different hardware where efficiency is important, such as on mobile devices or when working in virtual reality.
Chapter 9, Some Extra Useful Nodes, focuses on some of the most useful nodes we can find within Unreal that don't really belong to a collective category of their own.
