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

Introduction


The Material Editor is easy to get a hang of in terms of provisioning the Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Opacity, and Emissive features of a model asset, but UDK's editor offers far more functionality than just loading up and controlling imported textures. In particular, a range of nodes access the scene itself. You can call on the scene lighting, distance of pixels from the camera, the reflection for a given surface normal, and you can even drive Materials in the scene through Scalar parameters in your code. In many of the recipes so far we have already discussed the everyday operators that you can use in the Material Editor, from Fresnel Falloff to FlipBooks. Here, we're going to focus mainly on the more difficult, but equally useful scene driven operators (and a few others that we haven't touched on so far).

From UDK versions after September 2011, a new ease of use feature has been added to the Material Editor. Material Functions are encapsulated fragments of commonly used operations...