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

Light exclusivity using channels and levels


The previous recipe touched on the use of lighting channels to specify that lights will exclusively affect objects given the same lighting channels. In this recipe the intention is to learn how levels and channels can be employed to make sure lights influence only what you want them to. Levels are actual division of content into distinct maps, loading as required. Channels relate content according to which channel an object is assigned to, something like layers. Either way, lights will effect objects in the same level or channel that they are assigned to.

How to do it...

  1. Grab any PointLight and press F4 to expose its properties and look in the Lighting | Lighting Channels section, which is a long list of channels such as Unnamed1, Cinematic1, and Gameplay1.

  2. Add a PointLight to the scene we've been using, or you can otherwise open: Packt_08_CornellChannels_Start.UDK and set its Lighting | Lighting Channels | Unnamed1 checkbox to be ticked on. By default...