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 particles using SubUV charts


Suppose you are creating an explosion effect for a film. You might go out and shoot video of flames against a black background so you can mix that footage into the effect. For a one second blast you'd wind up with 30 or so frames, which is no problem in a film, but in a game, you have to handle all those frames. One method is to spread the frames from the explosion onto a single grid and then read off each square in the grid in series. In Cascade, the term SubUV refers to rendering part of a texture onto a sprite. You can combine textures onto a grid, such as 4x4 or 8x8, and tell UDK to use SubUV for the texture and it will parse each of the grid squares for content to render. This can be done by stepping through the grid squares in order (linearly) or randomly.

Getting ready

Furnishing a 1024x1024 SUBUV texture card grid:

  1. I'm going to assume the use of Photoshop for image processing in the book but you could use any equivalent image editor like GIMP...