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

Adjusting shadows through light environments


We mentioned that there are three main light types in UDK: an Emissive component, static and dynamic light actors , and a Light Environment. Light Environments apply to InterpActors, RigidBody actors, and SkeletalMeshes. Every InterpActor (aka Mover) and KActor (aka RigidBody) has a dynamic light environment by default. Light environments provide level designers with an automated way of controlling dynamic lighting by approximating the effect of relevant static lights. With that in mind, this recipe gives a guided tour of light environment staging in a scene so a SkeletalMesh can be lit dynamically in a way that reduces harsh shadows.

Getting ready

Load the provided map Packt_08_LightEnvironment_Start.UDK. This scene shows a small enclosure with a DominantDirectionalLight (Sun), a Skydome, and some weak fill lights. The next screenshot shows the scene, and the XYZ axis is the location of the DominantDirectionalLight as it shines along its X axis...