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

Comparison of static and dynamic lighting


Static lighting is best for objects that never move, especially with respect to their shadows.

Dynamic lights allow a shadow which is very crisp to update with changes in the model animation (both changes in deformation and changes in world position).

Static shadows are baked in place, and are only built once. Dynamic shadows are rendered on the fly, constantly updating as scene elements change.

In the real world, of course, all shadows would therefore come under the dynamic category, but that is quite expensive in a computed world, so static lighting's mission is to give us a fast render which, while looking nice comes with the limitation that it will only hold up if nothing is moving. The problem is that, in a game, lots of things move.

If you have ever placed a UTTeleporter in your level and wondered why it renders black, or not at all, you will have confronted the need for dynamic lighting. Some objects require a dynamic light to perform properly...