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

Setting up a custom AnimTree


This recipe shows how to furnish a custom AnimTree with asset link ups that allow our character to preview what will occur in a game and to play animations that reflect its assigned moves.

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser, highlight your folder, right-click amongst the assets, and choose New AnimTree.

  2. Name it YourFolder.Anims.TestTree. Double-click the newly created AnimTree and it will open in the AnimTree Editor, showing only a base AnimTree node.

  3. Before adding more nodes, we must set the Properties of the AnimTree node so it understands the assets we'll be using, much as we did with the SkeletalMesh in the previous recipe after we placed the asset in the scene. Let's work down the list, using the next screenshot as a reference:

  4. Expand the Anim Tree section in the properties of the AnimTree node and look at the channel Preview Mesh List. This requires Packt_Character (or another SkeletalMesh) to be added here, which will then show in the preview window.

  5. If...