Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

CryENGINE is a complete game development environment used by AAA game development studio Crytek to produce blockbuster games such as Crysis 1, 2 and 3. This complete Beginner's Guide takes the would be game developer through the steps required to create a game world complete with event scripting, user interface and 3D environment in the free CryENGINE SDK. Learn to create game worlds with the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox, the tool used to create AAA games like the soon to be released Crysis 3. Follow straightforward examples to sculpt the terrain, place vegetation, set up lighting, create game sounds, script with Lua and code with C++. Learn to navigate the interface within the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox, the tool used to create AAA games like Crysis 1 and 2, as well as the soon to be released Crysis 3. Learn to create your own worlds by following straight forward examples to sculpt the terrain, place vegetation, set up lighting, create game sounds, and script with the Lua language. The book covers all beginner aspects of game development including an introduction to C++ for non- coders.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
CryENGINE 3 Game Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using character assets


A character is a combination of geometry data that is attached to a predefined skeletal hierarchy. Examples include human bodies, aquatic animals, aliens, horses, and ropes. In the following examples, we will be dealing with humans, but keep in mind that most of these concepts can be applied to other types of animated assets as well.

Animated characters are integral to any game. Whenever you want to have realistic-looking movement, you need to be able to skin the asset's mesh to a skeleton. Once the mesh has been skinned, it can be exported to engine as a .chr. There is also a second format used mostly in vehicles or rigid body assets called .cga.

Following the character creation pipeline

There are four important steps involved in preparing and animating your character from CryENGINE 3:

  1. Create a character and export a .chr file.

  2. Enter the character's information into the .cba file.

  3. Animate the character and export a .caf file.

  4. Add the exported .caf file to the character ...