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

Interactive Foliage Actors


WorldPositionOffset was discussed in a couple of cases earlier in this chapter, and there's one more interesting case: how Interactive Foliage Actors use this feature. An Interactive Foliage Actor needn't have anything to do with foliage, but that is what it is often used for. Epic Games provides a video of the actor being used to create a field of undergrowth which reacts to the bounds of a Bot as it runs around amongst it: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/InteractiveFoliageActor/WalkingThroughFields.mp4. A spring system automatically applied to the actor (it can be any StaticMesh) drives the interaction.

In this recipe we'll look at what we can do with the Material nodes that are involved, using the node which possibly has the longest name of all: FoliageNormalizedRotationAxisAndAngle.

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser, find Packt.Mesh.PowerCore and highlight it. Right-click in the scene and choose Add InteractiveFoliageActor: Packt.Mesh.PowerCore...