Unreal Engine 4 Scripting with C++ Cookbook

Chapter 11. Custom Materials and Shaders

Material definition and creation tools in UE4 are fantastic, not to mention its real-time rendering performance. When you see your first glittering gold shader, you will be amazed at UE4's Material shading capabilities, which are possible with a bit of math. We will show you how to use these tools through the following recipes:

• Modifying color using a basic Material
• Modifying position using a Material
• Shader code via Custom node
• The Material function
• Shader parameters and Material instances
• Glimmer
• Leaves and Wind
• Reflectance dependent on the viewing angle
• Randomness – Perlin noise
• Shading a Landscape

Introduction

In computer graphics, a shader is used to color something. Traditionally, shaders were so called since ...