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

Installing ActorX and exporting skeletal animation


Getting ready

ActorX is provided with UDK. It can be found in the folder C:\UDK\~\Binaries\ActorX (where ~ is your version number). You will notice there are many variants, supporting popular 3D software. For 3ds Max users like myself, all that is required to get ActorX working is to choose the version of the supplied ActorX.dlu files which matches the 3ds Max version, and copy it to C:\Program files\Autodesk\3ds Max ~\plugins. At the time of writing, users of 3ds Max 2012 have to use the .FBX format instead of ActorX, which is discussed later. Maya and XSI tutorials can be found at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ActorX.html.

If you don't use 3ds Max but still want to read the UDK importing information, skip to the next recipe.

There is a pipeline for handling characters in UDK:

  1. Create and skin a model that matches the rigs supplied by Epic Games, or create a model and rig it yourself using a rig naming convention that matches the convention...