Under the Hood I + Lighting + Special Effects in UE4
During the lecture part of today, we started our exploration of what is happening under the hood of a game engine, beginning our discussion with the humble triangle, which is the basis for most 3D games. Every triangle is made of three points, and if they're clockwise or counterclockwise tells us if they're facing forwards or backwards.
We use the normal vector (or normal map for more fine-grained control) on a triangle to do the lighting calculations on it, and we can apply a picture to it, called a texture, as well by doing UV mapping between the triangle and the texture.
We then hopped into UE4 and talked about the Postprocessing Volume which can be used for all sorts of cool special effects like film grain, vignette, depth of field, tinting, and so forth. Have fun playing with it.
Finally we started our conversation on lighting. Lighting is very important in a game, since:
1) It lets you see (darkness is very boring)
2) It sets the mood
3) It lets you highlight things for the player to pay attention to