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

Forcing a mesh to always face the camera


This example uses the RotateAboutAxis node and a Custom node in the Material Editor, so we'll be covering how to enter a custom expression into the node too. An example that's practical for the use of a mesh constrained to the camera could be distant trees, or any large billboard style geometry standing in for a more detailed asset to save memory: airships circling in the sky, fish schooling in the sea. As we'll see, it's best used where the player can't get up close to the sprites however.

Getting ready

Open the scene Packt_09_FacingPlanes_Start.UDK and note that there are three BSP cards which we can use for testing. PIE and note that the cards don't orient towards the camera as you run around them. For this method of rotating the objects, StaticMesh planes won't work. You can try applying the Material created in this recipe to the StaticMesh objects in the scene (the small planes) and you'll see they shrink to thin lines. BSP will work better.

How...