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

Emissive lighting


This scene reproduces the Cornell box commonly used for CG rendered lighting tests and exploration. In this case, rather than use light actors in the scene, we'll see how far we can get by just using the Emissive property of a Material assigned to a BSP in the scene. There are numerous cases where this would be a good way to go; it all boils down to being able to get realistic dispersion of light around the form of the light source. If your light is a cable or tube, or is enclosed (as shown next) then it is inefficient, and sometimes difficult, to manage several PointLights spread around the area.

Getting ready

Load the provided map Packt_08_CornellEmissive_Start.UDK. There are two BSP boxes in the scene and a PlayerStart actor.

How to do it...

  1. Select the BSP floor surface, right-click, and choose Select Surfaces | All Matching Brush (Shift + B).

  2. In the Material Editor, highlight the Material Packt.Material.Packt_CornellBase and then right-click in the editor and choose Apply...