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

Defining animations in your AnimTree


This recipe shows how to furnish the AnimTree we have been working on with actual animation controls and sequences. It extends the previous recipe, which set up the properties of the AnimTree to include our character assets. We won't be creating an entire animation tree, only the bare bones needed for walking around, including an Idle.

How to do it...

  1. With your TestTree AnimTree asset open, right-click in the editor and choose New Animation Node | UDKAnimBlendByPhysics, shown next, which you can hook up to the Animation output of the AnimTree node. This node is usually the end node for all the animation to parse through. It covers situations such as walking, falling, and swimming. Additional inputs can be added by right-clicking and choosing Add Input.

  2. From the PHYS_Walking output extend to a New Animation Node | BlendBy | UDKAnimBlendByIdle, shown in the next screenshot. This gives us a control to switch between Idle animations and Moving animations. There...