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 a Landscape


This recipe covers the basics of making a Landscape, which is a newer alternative to using the Terrain tool. It features a more painterly tool set, and can also import Heightmaps from software such as Vue or Terragen. Heightmaps are black and white textures where light tones influence a surface to push it upwards, and darker tones effect it less. Our goals will be to model a simple Landscape asset, and paint texture layers on it. Afterward, we'll scatter trees and rocks across it using the Foliage tool (which isn't limited to foliage).

Getting ready

Open UDK fresh, and from the File | New menu load the map template Midday Lighting. You may want to read about the technological basis for the Landscape tool at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html.

How to do it...

Generating a Landscape asset:

  1. To open Landscape Mode, click the icon which resembles a mountain with an L on it, shown here. Above it, the other icon with a mountain is for Terrain.

  2. The Landscape Edit dialog...