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

Enabling the head to face in a given direction for tracking purposes


Animators can import any key frame animation as a sequence, but it is very hard to cover all the conditions whereby a part of a character will face or follow or track another moving object during gameplay. In the next lesson, we'll show how to use the AnimTree nodes to let you rotate a bone after assigning it a controller.

Getting ready

Fully load the Packt package by right-clicking on it in the Content Browser Packages List, then highlight the group Anims. Open the AnimTree Packt_CharTree_AimStart.

You can also find an example of Aim functionality in the AT_CH_Human AnimTree for upper body movement. For the case of the upper body on our character, we'll apply an offset control to the swimming physics blending. In the next screenshot, you can see our starting point where the PHYS_Swimming channel feeds a Forward directional sequence:

How to do it...

  1. Right-click and add the node called New Animation Node | AnimNodeAimOffset....