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

Chapter 3. It Lives!—Character Setup and Animation

In this chapter we examine key processes for handling animated characters:

  • Installing ActorX and exporting skeletal animation

  • Importing SkeletalMesh content into UDK

  • Morph targets and .FBX importing

  • Setting up sockets

  • Attachments to SkeletalMeshes without using sockets

  • Setting up a custom AnimTree

  • Defining animations in your AnimTree

  • Configuring your character to use your AnimTree

  • How to use a single bone control chain to correct an offset crouch animation

  • Setting up a physics asset using PhAT

  • Adding limits to physics asset joint rotations

  • Adding a physics-driven tail to a key framed SkeletalMesh

  • Enabling the head to face in a given direction for tracking purposes

  • Setting a LookAt target for head rotation in code

  • Setting morph weights in code

  • Calling up SkeletalMesh animations using Matinee

  • Associating sounds with character moves in Matinee

  • Sounds for non-Matinee controlled animation