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

Translucent colored glass


UDK lighting can pick up the color from a Material used by a translucent, shadow casting object, and cast it as a kind of caustic onto another surface. This Transmission is calculated automatically. For Lit Materials it uses the Material's Diffuse channel, plus white, linearly interpolated (Lerp) by the Opacity channel to work out the Transmission. For Unlit Materials it uses the Emissive channel, plus white, linearly interpolated (Lerp) by the Opacity channel to work out the Transmission. Modulated Materials are calculated slightly differently, using just the Diffuse or Emissive channel depending on whether they use the Lit or Unlit lighting model. That's a mouthful to digest, certainly, so we are going to do an example which shows on one hand a Lit Material using Translucency, and alongside it, an Unlit Material using Additive mode.

In this recipe we'll be creating a stained glass window effect, based on the concept of Transmission outlined above. First we'll generate...