Fake interior shader for cheap windows

How to create material to simulate interior through window in Unreal engine.

In many outdoor environments like cityscapes there are a lot of different buildings. You’d probably want to show that buildings are not empty box-like objects. Instead, they have various rooms interiors visible through their windows. This could be expensive as long as you need to model all exteriors, texture them and set-up lights. It became even more expensive if you need use some glass shader to make windows looks more material. The glass could probably reflect some light or be dirty. And at the same time it should be transparent. Transparent objects are expensive.

But in case when such interiors are part of background, what means that its is not mentioned that player can be near enough to explore them, there is some hacks.

Parallax Texture

The first is to use parallax texture.

This approach was used such games as Bioshock Infinite and many other:

Cubemap Texture

The more accurate approach is to use a cubemap. This method gives you more realistic result.

Radial Blur Shader in Unreal Engine 4

Today I've made this simple post process material, that applies a radial blur to screen. That was made for a sniper rifle mode in game, when player is looking through a optical sight. And we've got this raw effect:

 

Creating Fur in Unreal Engine

This tutorial shows how to create a fur like on screenshots below, using shells technique. This technique creates a number of shells around geometry and assigns material, that simulates fur slice for each shell. This looks pretty well from a distance.

Unreal: Debugging materials and shaders example

Here is two tips that may be usefull if you want to debug your shader.

There is many ways to debug shaders in Unreal Engine. For example, you can translate your shader into HLSL code and use any software that you like for debug that. Or install a Renderdoc plugin to capture a whole frame in Unreal's viewport and jump to Renderdoc. You can read more about it here.

But sometimes you don't want to dig deeper when debugging and use a third-party software, especially if you are not going to solve something complicated, but want to debug some value or see what shader does after interpretation in hlsl.

How to make text facing a camera in Unreal Engine

Hi, I've found a pretty easy way to do that by writing a shader.

If you deal with a text-in-a-wolrd in Unreal it's most likely that you use the TextRenderComponent. It uses a text material and here we begin. All we need is to change this material.