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

Creating transitions between Materials


There are a number of ways to transition between two Materials, where a mesh changes from having one to having another. Some Material changes can be sudden, simply using the Set Material action in Kismet. Some transitions can be done using a linear opacity dissolve, where a parameter is animated to adjust a Lerp node's Alpha to weight from A towards B for instance. Others require a more organic blend though, such as a dry to wet transition through spattering rain drops, or a burning transition that crawls over a surface. The method explained here assumes that three Materials will be used: a Material set before the transition, another set during the transition, and another set afterward. The design of the blending is where the creative problem-solving lies, and there are numerous ways to come up with an interesting mask. Masking can reveal an underlying texture, or simple fade out to nothing. A lot of artists blend to transparent using noise textures...