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 9. The Devil Is In The Details!—Making the Most of Materials

This chapter's recipes cover some of the Material Editor's deepest, darkest secrets. Most of the solutions pave the way for further exploration; exposure to a new tool often means that other functionality is also exposed. The recipes presented here are not tailored exclusively for a game level (for simplicity's sake), but their use in game construction is explained too.

In this chapter, we'll discuss activities such as:

  • Animating a Material Instance Constant in Kismet

  • Forcing a mesh to always face the camera

  • A cloth-like effect using WorldPositionOffset

  • Creating murky liquid

  • Creating a scanning effect

  • Quick glass

  • Creating transitions between materials

  • Static Cubemap creation and real-time reflection

  • Wet surface reflections with dynamic actors

  • Making a holographic effect using Bump Offset

  • InteractiveFoliageActors

  • Getting varied hit impacts off models using a PhysicalMaterial