Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Scattering meshes on a Landscape using the Foliage tool


Foliage Mode extends the Landscape tools, and sits alongside Landscape Mode in the editor. In this recipe we'll scatter rock meshes on a Landscape surface, since the Foliage tool, while great for making forests and grass, is not limited to just that.

Getting ready

Open the file Packt_01_Foliage_Start.UDK. This extends from the previous example.

How to do it...

  1. Press Foliage Mode, shown on the right-hand side in the previous image. Then press Ctrl + Shift + F and in the Browser search for rock to expose StaticMesh assets of that type (although you can use whatever meshes you like).

  2. In the Foliage dialog there is an area, Meshes, to drop assets to be used. You can drag in several.

  3. The meshes will appear there and each will have parameters for setting scale, count, and angle when brushed. They can also be assigned to separate layers in the Landscape using existing Parameter Names (such as first, second, third).

  4. There are three icons that allow...