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

Attachments to SkeletalMeshes without using sockets


Sockets are handy to use because they can be called on in code no matter the actual object is that is active in the socket. Sometimes though, it's sufficient to just directly attach an object to another already in the scene. By default, objects attach to the target object's main pivot. You can also define an attachment to the pivot of a bone in a SkeletalMesh object's hierarchy. In the Attachment section of the Properties panel (F4) of the object you want attached, you can point to a Base Bone Name in the target's skeleton if you want the selected object to stick to it. To get a bone's name just open the SkeletalMesh in the AnimSet Editor and click on the icon Show Skeleton [ ].

How to do it...

  1. Start the map template Midday Lighting. In the Content Browser, find Packt_Character and drag the asset into the Perspective view.

  2. Find the particle Emitter SmokePlume in the browser. Drag SmokePlume into the scene also.

  3. Press F4 with SmokePlume selected...