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

Ambient occlusion


Scene ambient occlusion is off by default in UDK, and generally speaking just turning it on will be enough to get a nice result. Indirect lighting is not off by default. The main distinction is that indirect light is a fill from light bounces, adding secondary light onto surfaces not lit by direct lights or key lights. Ambient occlusion deals with the blocking of light from the sky (the indirect light source and any bounced light from it) by objects in proximity to each other.

Think about it like this. If you hold up one hand, with your knuckles facing a lamp, you'll still see some light on your palm (unless the lamp is weak and you are in a huge empty room). The light on your palm is bounced light, or indirect lighting. Now, if you lift your other hand too, so your palms are facing, you will notice the palm surfaces get darker and darker the closer your hands get. The indirect light is occluded. So ambient occlusion is the occlusion of the sky light (usually thought of...