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

Animating a Material Instance Constant in Kismet


In this recipe we'll go through the steps to create a MaterialInstanceConstant (MIC), and show how a MIC can be used to set up player influence over the qualities within a Material. This was already set up and used in the final recipes from Chapter 4, Got Your Wires Crossed? They were active in the night-to-day transition in the scenes. A MaterialInstanceConstant exposes a parameter to animation such as an RGB color channel, a brightness channel or the strength of an Alpha channel. In practical applications, you could use this as a way to alter Materials on assets; making the tattoos on a magic creature glow for instance, as its powers charge up.

Getting ready

From the provided content, load the scene Packt_09_MIC_Start.UDK.

The scene shows a quite abstract special effect. If you don't want to see this looping in the perspective viewport, press the Real time toggle (Ctrl + R), which is the joystick icon [ ].

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser...