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

Making a holographic effect using Bump Offset


Bump Offset provides us with a way of doing a stacked effect within a Material so that the Material doesn't appear completely flat. It projects content based on a height value to simulate displacement. It is really good for enhancing bumpy surfaces like courtyard cobble stones. Still, on top of this, we can offset different elements in a Material so they float, or appear to, which can form the basis for a convincing holographic image.

Getting ready

The artwork for the texture is already provided. It is worth looking at the construction of it in Photoshop first. Open up MaskRGBA_DEMO.PSD and got to the menu Window | Channels.

Each channel includes a distinct image in black and white. UDK can access the channels of a texture individually, and this is really handy for mask usage, since masks are usually a single channel. The image also includes an Alpha, which is really just an additional channel. The 512x512 image has to be saved as a .TGA in 32bit...