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

Depth of field


There are three depth of field looks you'll want to learn to achieve. The first is when the background is out of focus and the foreground is sharp, which is fairly easy, and the second, which is somewhat more difficult, is the opposite, where the background is sharp while the foreground is blurred. The third case is where both foreground and background are blurry but a telephoto style patch of the middle distance is sharp.

UDK gives us two ways to create Depth of Field, and these handle two of the above goals well. A Position based blur , being locked to a world location, is good for the third case, middle ground focus, but isn't dynamic. A Distance based blur method defocuses the background far better than it handles the foreground.

DOF can be applied in the scene based on a BSP volume created by the designer. If you use these, only the volume you are in yields a result to the screen draw, and if you are outside a volume you won't see its effects. On top of that, post-processing...