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

Penumbras and hotspots


The goal in this recipe will be to achieve a nice resolution shadow with a convincing shadow Falloff. As we've seen, not all of the available lighting solutions support penumbras. If you are not sure what a penumbra is, place the tip of your finger on the table and look at the shadow your hand casts. Around the tip of the finger the shadow will look darker and sharper than it looks as the distance between the table and your hand increases. Hotspots, the bright part of a spotlight, also have a penumbra caused by distance from the light to the surface. What causes the penumbra? Since the source of light is not an absolute point but in fact a surface, the angle of light isn't really coming from one place. Not all of the light is blocked equally around an object's edges, which leads to soft gradients in the shadow.

Before we begin, it is strongly suggested that the initial step when delving into shadow casting in UDK would be to look over the documentation provided by Epic...