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

Setting up a physics asset using PhAT


Physics assets let you animate your character using forces and impulses such as gravity or hit impacts, using collision calculations between simple geometry objects assigned to your character's bones.

It is relatively easy to provision a SkeletalMesh with a physics asset. It takes some tinkering around to make the initial results more pleasing. The main editor to get used to is the Physics Actor Tool (PhAT).

Getting ready

Previously we created an AnimTree for the SkeletalMesh Packt_Character. To keep the focus of the exercise on the AnimTree, a physics asset was already prepared and included in the script that drives the character. It was just a placeholder. In this exercise we'll make the real physics asset for this model.

We'll start with just the Packt_Character SkeletalMesh, and we'll create and test out some physics attributes in the PhAT Editor. In the Content Browser, make sure the Packt package is fully loaded in the Packages list.

How to do it....