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

A cloth-like effect using WorldPositionOffset


In this recipe we'll go through the steps to generate a wavy surface in the mesh, which could be used for a variety of effects, including swaying objects such as hanging plants, cloth, or magical effects.

How to do it...

  1. Start a new scene, and in the Content Browser, search the provided content for PacktKismet.Mesh.MyWavyMesh and right-click on it; choose Create a Copy... and place this to Yourfolder.Mesh.WaveTest. Right-click this and choose Copy Full Name to Clipboard. It is just a thin BSP box that has had its edges split a few times before being converted to a StaticMesh. A BSP itself wouldn't work because it doesn't respond to the vertex offsets we'll be doing to the converted geometry. Place the asset in the scene, above the ground. Right-click on it and choose Convert | StaticMeshActor to Mover.

  2. In the Content Browser, right-click and choose New Material; name it Yourfolder.Material.Wave_mat and open it up.

  3. In the Material's PreviewMaterial...