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

Creating a scanning effect


This recipe continues on from the previous one. Open the scene Packt_09_DepthBiased_Start.UDK. You will see a large pool and an enclosed passageway, both filled with objects. What we're interested in is the Material for the energy field in the passageway. It should sweep over the objects (as it's already animated in a Matinee). When the surface touches an object, we're going to make the surface of the energy field glow where contact occurs.

How to do it...

  1. In the Content Browser, right-click and choose New Material. Call it Yourfolder.Material.DepthScanner. In the passageway in the scene, select the Mover that goes back and forth (InterpActor_0). Apply your new Material to it.

  2. Open the Material. Set its Lighting Model to MLM_Unlit and its Blend Mode to BLEND_Translucent.

  3. Hold L and click to add a Lerp; name it Emissive. Hook this Lerp up to the Material's Emissive channel.

  4. Hold 3, click to add a Constant 3 Vector, and set it to R = 20, G = 1, B = 1. This serves as the...