Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Beginner's Guide

By : Richard Moore
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Beginner's Guide

By: Richard Moore

Overview of this book

Unreal Development Kit (UDK) is the free version of the award-winning Unreal Engine 3. It is used to create a wide variety of games ranging from amateur to professional standard next generation AAA titles. This book will show you exactly how to create an enjoyable and immersive game environment using the UDK. You will learn how to implement, level design, lighting, environmental effects, movement, terrain, map creation, item placement, kismet, materials and complex event sequences. You will work through the level design process from navigating round the editor to learning how to develop a fully playable environment. You will quickly master all of the engine’s key tools that are accessible through Unreal Engine 3. You will then start putting together your first level using step-by-step instructions. Next we will implement real world features such as dynamic lighting and shadows, particle effects, physics, terrain, item placement and advanced AI/bot pathing. Finally you will learn how to use UDK’s cutting edge high level scripting. By the end of this book you will be equipped with the skills to create an entertaining and imaginative game world.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit 3
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Time for action – lightmaps on static meshes


Baking lighting on static meshes is a little more versatile than on CSG geo. By default, all static meshes use vertex lighting—instead of baking into an image, light values get baked into the vertices that make up the geometry, and lighting is blended across the surface.

  1. In my map, there's a kind of a weird hard shadow near the top of the fire hydrant.

  2. If I overlay the wireframe on the image (Photo-shopped for clarity), you can see that the shadow falls right along one of the mesh's edges. That's effectively the result you get from vertex lighting.

  3. But lots of meshes in UDK are set up so that you can put a lightmap on them too, and this fire hydrant is one of them. Open up the mesh in the generic browser and look at the LightMapCoordinateIndex value. If it's 1, then the mesh is probably set up for lightmaps, otherwise it probably isn't.

    So how do we actually turn on the lightmap?

  4. Close the Static Mesh Editor, select the fire hydrant in the scene, and...