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

Quick glass


In this recipe we'll go over a way to generate a reasonable glass material. In reality, glass reflects the local environment, which is a tough call in a game environment. In this example we'll fake reflections, while in a later recipe we'll look at recording reflection maps from the actual scene too.

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser, right-click and choose New Material. Name it Yourfolder.Material.Quickglass_mat.

  2. In the Material PreviewMaterial properties , set the Blend Mode to BLEND_Translucent and also turn on Two Sided.

  3. It's good to preview this kind of Material on a complex model, so highlight Packt.Mesh.Statue in the Content Browser. Right-click and choose Copy Full Name to Clipboard. In the PreviewMaterial properties , expand Material Interface and paste into the field the mesh name. Note that the eyes, which have their own Material, won't be affected, just the statue body.

  4. In the Material Editor, hold 1 and click to add a Constant and set its R value to 0.5. Press Ctrl...