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

Ensuring shadows work with translucent or alpha based materials


Alpha channels are often used to control opacity (of leaves, hair, dirt in windows, or decals). The use of a simple square card, or sprite, to render the complexity of a leaf or a tuft of fur is highly efficient. Getting a 'hair' shadow off a card with translucency isn't hard but there are some limitations to be aware of in UDK, particularly to do with whether you are rendering a shadow off of a moving or static object, or if you want to have moving lights in the scene. Light from Material Emissive channels doesn't really give a detailed result when casting shadows derived from a Texture Sample node's Alpha output. Light from the DominantDirectionalLight type also won't readily produce a good alpha shadow because it must be masked.

To make the translucent Materials cast dynamic shadows as masked Materials, set the Material's Cast Lit Translucency Shadow As Masked property to true and set the Opacity Mask Material parameter

—UDN...