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Designing Visuals, Rendering, and Graphics

Rendering subsystem including lighting and shadowing, materials and textures, visual effects, and post processing.

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Unreal Engine's rendering system is the core of its industry-leading visuals for designing interactive real-time experiences. Here, you'll learn about the features, concepts, and tools used to design and develop your projects that can scale from cinematic film and television quality to next-gen console and mobile platforms with remarkable fidelity.

The topics below can help you in setting up and managing your textures and materials applied to surfaces, learning about conceptual lighting techniques that can be applied when building your virtual worlds , creating stunning visual effects, optimizing and debugging content for performance, and much more.

Introduction

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Rendering Overview

Overview of the main features of the rendering subsystem.

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Supported Rendering Features

Detailing which rendering features are supported on which platforms.

Art Setup and Tools

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Textures

Image assets used in Materials to apply to surfaces or drawn on-screen by the HUD.

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Materials

Controlling the appearance of surfaces in the world using shaders.

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Physically Based Materials

An overview of the primary Material inputs and how best to use them.

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Render Targets

Using Render Targets in Unreal Engine 4.

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Scene Capture

Using Scene Capture Actors in Unreal Engine 4.

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Render To Texture Blueprint Toolset

Page that lists multiple links to pages that expand on the Render to Texture Blueprint tool

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High Dynamic Range Display Output

Overview for HDR Display Output and available options.

Lighting Concepts and Features

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Lighting the Environment

Using Lighting and shadowing geometry, using Global Illumination, and setting up reflections.

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Lighting Basics

The basics of placing lights into levels and setting them up.

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Global Illumination

Learn about the available precomputed and dynamic global illumination options available.

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Real-Time Ray Tracing

An overview of Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4.

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Lighting Channels

Lighting Channels ia a rendering feature that enables you to choose what renderable surfaces are lit by specific lights.

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Precomputed Lighting Scenarios

With Precomputed Lighting Scenarios you can have multiple lighting setups for a single level using the same geometry.

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Reflection Environment

System for capturing and displaying local glossy reflections.

Visuals and System Tools

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Post Process Effects

Effects applied to the whole rendered scene prior to being rendered.

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Niagara Visual Effects

Unreal Engine 4's Niagara visual effects system used for creating and previewing particle effects in real time.

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Cascade Particle Systems

Assets the contain any number of particle emitters used to create effects in the world.

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Forward Shading Renderer

Describes the advantages of using the Forward Shading Renderer.

Performance and Debugging

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Scalability

Options for adjusting quality and performance.

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Virtual Texturing

An overview of the available Virtual Texturing methods.

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Visibility and Occlusion Culling

An overview of Visibility and Occlusion Culling methods in Unreal Engine 4.

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Texture Streaming

System for loading and unloading textures into and out of memory during play.

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Dynamic Resolution

An overview of the Dynamic Resolution system used in Unreal Engine 4.

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Screen Percentage with Temporal Upsample

An overview of using Screen Percentage with Temporal Upsampling.

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RenderDoc

RenderDoc is a standalone open-source graphics debugger that you can use to perform single-frame captures and inspect them.

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Pixel Inspector

The Pixel Inspector shows you what is happening in the various parts of the GBuffer at a given pixel.

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Rendering Visualizers

Display options and view modes to check on the results of various rendering features.

Mobile Rendering and Visualization

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Mobile Rendering

Information about rendering features on mobile platforms.

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Mobile Previewer

Previewing your games inside the UE4 Editor is based on the selected Mobile Platforms.

Visualization Tools

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HDRI Backdrop

Use the HDRI Backdrop to quickly set up product visualization using an HDR image projection with real-time lighting and shadowing.

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Path Tracer

An overview of the Path Tracer in Unreal Engine 4.

Third-Party Tools

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NVIDIA Feature Support

Integrated and supported technologies from NVIDIA for use with your games.

Graphics Programming

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