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

Enhancing sunrays using lens flares


A lens flare is a distraction in an image caused by stray light in the camera lens. There are two kinds of lens flares. One is directional, based on a cone (much the same as is used by a spotlight) and the other is radial (standard). Flares are a modified version of a particle, and have an editor much like Cascade, and their elements are made through the Material Editor. If you have been thorough with the chapters so far, you'll be kind of familiar with a lot of the steps required. The order of ceremonies is outlined in the UDN page: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LensFlareEditorUserGuide.html. In this recipe we are going to construct a lens flare from scratch to place in an existing lit scene.

Getting ready

From the provided content, open Packt_08_LensFlare_Start.UDK and note the big sun sphere hanging under the Skydome. Our lens flare effect will serve to complement it.

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser, in your folder, right-click and choose New LensFlare...