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

Animating cinematic cameras


In this recipe we continue from the previous lesson where we created and placed cameras in their initial positions and assigned variables for them in the Kismet. This time we'll animate those cameras to embellish the level with some cut scenes. One is an introduction and the other highlights a key event in the gameplay.

Getting ready

Open the scene Packt_04_Cinematic_Start.UDK or continue on from the previous recipe.

How to do it...

  1. In Kismet, next to a Player Spawned event, hold M and click to add a Matinee action. Right-click on the Object Variable WideCam and choose Select Actor in Level. Then double-click the Matinee action. It's useful to have the actor you want to animate already selected when you open the Matinee Editor so that it is automatically assigned the Groups you create tracks for. Some tracks are only available to certain kinds of actors.

  2. In the Matinee Editor, under All in the dark gray tracks panel, right-click and choose New Camera Group. Call this...