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

Adding a physics-driven tail to a key framed SkeletalMesh


Our model has a prominent tail, and it would be good to be able to use physics on this to control its behavior. The process also works with capes and long hair.

How to do it...

  1. So the tail can work, back in 3ds Max we would need to add tail bones to our original model, which ideally would occur right at the original rigging and skinning stage. To speed things up, we will use an alternative model Packt_SkinTail.PSK with a tail already weighted to additional bones, and a corresponding AnimSet Packt_SkinTailAnims. In this replacement character, three tail bones have been skinned to the mesh after being linked to b_Hips.

  2. To avoid wasting the work we did on your physics asset so far, find it in the Content Browser, right-click on it, and choose Create a Copy. Name the copy CharPhysics_TailAdd and open it. This asset uses the Packt_Character SkeletalMesh, which has no tail bones. Luckily there is a tool, in the PhAT Editor Edit menu called...