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

Calling up SkeletalMesh animation using Matinee


In Kismet, a Matinee action can be used to fire off events in a time-based manner, and an AnimNotify is an AnimTree node that lets us associate AnimTree content with Matinee tracks. For example, you could have a looping animation for a SkeletalMesh walking or idling, then use a Trigger in the scene to fire off a Matinee which swaps in a falling animation to replace the idle. A Matinee can also be used to control Morph target keys.

Getting ready

Load the map template Midday Lighting.

How to do it...

  1. Right-click in the scene and add a Trigger actor on the ground. In its properties turn off the check box for Display | Hidden so it shows during gameplay.

  2. In the Content Browser, locate and right-click on the AnimTree Packt_CharTreeSlotStart and choose Create a Copy and call the copy Yourname.Mesh.TestSlotTree.

  3. Double-click the result, then right-click in the canvas and choose New Animation Node | AnimNodeSlot.

  4. Place this in between the UDKAnimationBlendByPhysics...