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

How to use a single bone control chain to correct an offset crouch animation


In a crouch, the b_Root bone has to move down towards the ground. In UDK all the character animations are stored in the AnimSet and in this is a property called AnimSet | Anim Rotation Only that forces UDK to read off only rotations from the b_Root bone; this is helpful where you will create cyclic character moves but not so good if you want to create a crouch, where the feet are local to the ground, and the b_Root drops down in the Z axis.

In the AnimTree we can fix this by adding a single bone controller to b_Root called from the character rig. The controller also has a Node Name so we can access it in code.

Getting ready

In this example we'll create an empty AnimTree asset, and start from there. For ease of use later, in the Content Browser filters click All Types and right-click on the Animation Trees filter and choose Add to Favorites. This will allow you to easily locate your AnimTree asset as we go. Remember...