Preface

With an explosive growth in independent game development in the last few years, many developers are looking for robust and low-cost tools that would enable them to bring their dream games to market.

Blender is a powerful open source 3D software package used by developers across the globe; it is renowned for its ease of use and active community. Unreal Engine 4 is the amazing AAA game engine built by Epic Games that has become the go to choice for many game developers, large and small.

During the course of this book, we will look at how to utilize Blender to create both animated and static game art for Unreal Engine 4 and how to bring these assets into our own projects.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Unreal, My Friend, I'd Like You to Meet Blender, will guide you through installing and setting up the Blender 3D software package. We will discuss Blender's interface and tools as well as get started on our first project.

Chapter 2, Starting Our First Project, takes us into Unreal Engine 4 to begin designing the first level of our project. We will review some level design basics and put together a game level for our future game art to exist in.

Chapter 3, It's Time to Customize!, will have us started on creating the first game asset in Blender—a space age crate for our cargo ship level. We will cover basic modeling techniques and discuss the process for UV unwrapping and texturing our game asset.

Chapter 4, Getting the Assets to the Level, will discuss the process of exporting our crate from Blender and importing it into Unreal so that we can utilize it within our cargo ship level.

Chapter 5, Taking This Level Up a Notch, will see us move on from the cargo ship to building a space station level, with complete scripted events to add emotions for the player's experience. We will take a look at more advanced scripting techniques in Blueprint and prepare our level to receive a more advanced game asset.

Chapter 6, Monster Assets – The Level Totally Needs One of These, takes us through the design process to create a more advanced game asset—the Artifact. We will take a look at several more 3D modeling tools, and you will understand how to build your game asset from multiple components.

Chapter 7, Let's Dress to Impress, takes us through the process of UV unwrapping all the different pieces that make up the Artifact. We will look at some advanced UV tools in Blender. You will also learn how to utilize Substance Painter to create some amazing textures and materials.

Chapter 8, Lights, Camera, Animation!, brings us back to Blender to create animations for the Artifact. We will discuss the requirements for bringing animations into Unreal Engine 4, as well as using bones and rigging in Blender.

Chapter 9, Bang Bang – Let's Make It Explode, ends the book with a look at creating video game explosions using sound, particle effects, and flying parts. We will celebrate the completion of our game asset by importing it to Unreal Engine 4 and setting it to explode!

What you need for this book

The following hardware and software are needed for this book:

• Desktop PC or Mac

• Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.10 or later

• Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz, or faster

• NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or a higher version

• 8 GB RAM

• A three-button mouse

• Unreal Engine 4.9 or a later version

• Blender 2.76 Release Candidate 3 or a later version

• Substance Painter 1.7 30 day free trial or a later version

All software mentioned in this book is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Internet.

Who this book is for

This book is ideal for 3D artists and game designers who want to create amazing 3D game environments and leverage the power of Blender with Unreal Engine 4. 3D design basics would be necessary to get the most out of this book. Some previous experience with Blender would be helpful but not essential.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This can be found by typing Input E into the Find a Node search box."

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Add Modifier dropdown and select Mirror."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Errata

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Questions

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