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

Handling StaticMesh actors in the scene


StaticMesh actors are the meshed geometry in the scene used by designers to represent fixed environment components. A large library of these comes with the content provided by Epic Games in UDK. In this recipe we'll look at ways to bring that content into the scene, shift it around and adjust it, and make sure that lining it up with other content is no problem. We'll also look at converting a StaticMesh for other uses. In the previous recipe we set up a small scene just using BSP elements. This time we'll only use meshes from the Browser.

How to do it...

  1. Open the Content Browser (Ctrl + Shift + F). In the Packages List, make sure UDKGame is the selected folder. You can click on it to expand the sub-folders it contains.

  2. Click on the Object Type filter for Static Meshes and, under Tags, click on Building.

  3. Scroll down the assets (or type in the search field) to find S_NEC_Roofs_SM_Tiled_Solid.

  4. Drag this into the perspective viewport. While it is selected,...