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

Setting morph weights in code


In this recipe we'll compare setting Morph target values on a pawn through UnrealScript with doing so on a SkeletalMeshMAT using Matinee. This will bridge us between the previous lesson and the next one, which is also about character handling in Matinee. Both the examples in this lesson use the MorphTargets included in the FBX SkeletalMesh asset, which in the case of Packt_SkinTailFBX, our character, shrink each of her rather large ears.

Getting ready

Load the scene Packt_03_MatineeMorph_Start.UDK. This already includes a placed SkeletalMesh asset, and its preview assets have already been added to save time, since we already did similar steps in the recipe Attachments to SkeletalMeshes without using sockets.

How to do it...

  1. In the scene, select the actor SkeletalMeshMAT_0. This is a special instance of a SkeletalMesh asset which has been added using the right-click command: Add SkeletalMeshMAT: Packt_SkinTailFBX. Press Ctrl + B to highlight the asset in the browser...