To get the most out of this book

You will need a version of Unreal Engine, preferably the latest one. At the time of writing, this is Unreal Engine 5.1.1, even though 5.2.0 is already on the horizon. The topics covered in this book should be applicable to all Unreal Engine 5.X versions.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Unreal Engine 5	Windows 10 or 11
Optional – ray tracing capable graphics card
Optional – image editing software (Photoshop, GIMP)

All of the topics can be tackled using only the default Unreal Engine installation. Access to a hardware-enabled ray tracing graphics card can be useful in a specific recipe where we discuss hardware and software ray tracing. Access to image editing software is not needed, but we recommend it in case you want to modify or author your own textures.