Introduction to UDK

I've jumped ship from YouTube to Digital Tutors and found two tutorials which I'm really interested in. The first is an Introduction to UDK and the other is Creating a 3rd person action adventure puzzle game in UDK.

I've already finished the introductory tutorials so I'll talk about what I've learned so far!

BSP Brushes

BSP brushes are quite interesting... they are used for blocking in a level fairly quickly within the engine and due to the nature of both the BSP brushes and engine helps to work out the scaling of the world. They can also have materials applied to them which is pretty handy.

The idea is to set up a 'brush' using geometry and tools in order to create an outline of a shape which can then be filled using the additive brush function (Ctrl + a). Geometry can also be subtracted using the subtraction brush function (Ctrl + s). The brushes are left behind so the geometry can be altered and updated. 

Materials

I've had a glimpse into the material editor within UDK and there's a bunch of different things which can be achieved within it but for now I only understand the basic functionality. 

Static Meshes

UDK has a bunch of static meshes contained within the content browser which makes it possible to quickly mock up some levels/environments. The tools required to translate, rotate and scale static meshes in a 3D space was already covered in the last set of tutorials I completed (previous post) so nothing new was learned here. 

Lighting

Lighting in UDK is really simple. Simply add an actor class which is a light and double click on it to mess with its settings. Pretty straight forward. 

Audio

Adding audio is pretty much identical to adding light into a scene. Again, these videos only went over the basics; so far so good. 

Path Nodes

Adding path nodes allows AI of bots in UDK to run around the map. If they cannot find the player for the purpose of attacking them then the bots use the path nodes to run around the map. This obviously goes into a lot more depth when creating custom characters and AI but for now it's pretty basic with a lot of the knowledge behind it being left open to speculation until covered in a tutorial which focuses on AI. 

So ideally that's what I've been up to over the past couple of days. I completed all 16 tutorials in this series and picked up some tips here and there while learning some basic uses of the apparatus UDK offers. 

Cheers, 

Gavin

Learning UDK

Welcome

Hey folks and welcome to the blog. I thought I'd use this as a journal for myself and others as I try and further my skills in level design. That's pretty much it as far as it goes on a personal level. I'm sure I've talked about myself in my other blogs so I'll keep this one strictly level design orientated chatting about what I'm doing and showing my work. Please feel free to comment and give me constructive feedback on anything I post. 

UDK

I'm interested in using UDK for two reasons: (1) I have a personal interest in learning the engine and scripting in kismet to further my skills and (2) I have an upcoming project which could potentially be made in the UDK engine. 

Today I spent getting to grips with the engine. The first thing which is different from most game-related software packages I've used (Unity3D, Maya etc) is controlling the camera. I'm used to holding alt with a mouse button but it didn't take me too long to get used to UDK's 'flight mode'. 

I've been following this guys tutorials - Mozidesigners' channel - So kudos to him because they are great tutorials for getting started. 

I've learned the basics, mainly:

• Translation tools
• Camera control
• Using the Content Browser
• BSP's - The brush tools 
• and a bunch of other little things to do with settings (e.g. real time mode, lit, unlit etc)

Images speak louder than words so have a look at progress of my work for today:

UDK - Full scene

UDK - Ground level (doesn't represent height of character)

Cheers, 

Gavin