Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By : Valcasara
Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By: Valcasara

Overview of this book

With the arrival of Unreal Engine 4, a new wonderful tool was born: Blueprint. This visual scripting tool allows even non-programmers to develop the logic for their games, allowing almost anyone to create entire games without the need to write a single line of code. The range of features you can access with Blueprint script is pretty extensive, making it one of the foremost choices for many game developers. Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints helps you unleash the real power of Unreal by helping you to create engaging and spectacular games. It will explain all the aspects of developing a game, focusing on visual scripting, and giving you all the information you need to create your own games. We start with an introductory chapter to help you move fluidly inside the Blueprint user interface, recognize its different components, and understand any already written Blueprint script. Following this, you will learn how to modify generated Blueprint classes to produce a single player tic-tac-toe game and personalize it. Next, you will learn how to create simple user interfaces, and how to extend Blueprints through code. This will help you make an informed decision between choosing Blueprint or code. You will then see the real power of Unreal unleashed as you create a beautiful scene with moving, AI controlled objects, particles, and lights. Then, you will learn how to create AI using a behavior tree and a global level Blueprint, how to modify the camera, and how to shoot custom bullets. Finally, you will create a complex game using Blueprintable components complete with a menu, power-up, dangerous objects, and different weapons.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Animations


It is assumed that you already have knowledge about basic 3D animation concepts such as Skeletal Meshes, Bones, Frames, Rigs, and so on. We aren't going to create new animations from a mesh, but we will work with them so, if you don't know anything about them, I suggest you to take a break from this guide to find out more about those concepts using Google or Wikipedia.

The animation system of UE4 can be divided into three main tools: Persona, Skeleton, and Animation Sequences. These tools, combined together, give you the ability to manipulate and control your Skeletal Meshes. You can play and blend animations within an Animation Sequence, create customized moves using AnimMontages, create complex facial expression with MorphTarget, and do much more.

Skeleton

Skeleton is a hierarchy of bone locations and rotations used to deform a Skeletal Mesh. The difference between a traditional 3D environment is that Skeleton in UE4 are abstracted from Skeletal Meshes in their own assets, and...