Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What Unreal Engine 4 offers for animation in games


Animation in Unreal Engine 4 is mostly done in the Persona editor. This editor offers four different modes: Skeleton, Mesh, Animation, and Graph. These modes mainly exist so that you can jump straight into one of them to edit/create the animations more effectively. So, they are simply a loose group of functions that can be used to control the different aspects of animation. We will learn how to make use of the functions in Persona to add animation to our level.

To help improve team collaboration, Unreal Engine 4 also released a previously in-house-only toolset, which is a plugin for Maya (compatible for Maya 2013 and higher versions), known as Animation and Rigging Toolset (ART). This toolset provides a user interface to allow the creation of a skeleton, placement of the skeleton, and rig creation within Maya itself. We will not go into the details of this toolset, but you can find more information on this in Unreal's online documentation...