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The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between asset creation tools like 3ds Max,
Maya and XSI, and shippable game content. The editor itself is actually a suite of various tools for realizing your content in the Unreal Engine. Features include:
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- State-of-the-art visual level designer for placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPCs, inventory items, AI path nodes and light sources.
- Fully interactive real-time rendering of levels while editing, including dynamic lighting and shadows. All level content in the editor is presented consistently with the game
engine itself!
- Built on a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers
via script.
- Load and edit huge environments composed of many seamlessly streaming sub-levels.
- In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click away. You can test gameplay in one editor window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
- Brush-based architectural design system for rapid level prototyping and shelling.
- Takes full advantage of multiple processor cores for accelerating workflow, such as generation of static light and shadow interaction.
- Includes a suite of content editing tools:
- Terrain Editor, a landscape design tool. Supports geometry editing and painting of alpha layers onto terrain to control blending and decoration, collision data,
and displacement maps.
- Material Editor, an intuitive visual tool for designing materials and shaders.
- Mesh Editor, for previewing meshes and adjusting physics properties. Also includes support for simplification of meshes, generating LODs and texture coordinates,
and fracturing objects.
- Animation Editors, for configuring skeletal animation behavior, designing complex animation states, and
binding them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
- UnrealPhAT, the Physics Asset Tool for creating physics rigs for characters and objects (e.g. ragdolls).
- UnrealCascade, a particle physics and environmental effects editor.
- UnrealMatinee, a powerful tool for authoring in-game cinematics.
- UnrealKismet, a visual scripting language.
- UI Editor, a style-based designer for user interfaces. Includes built-in support for importing True Type fonts.
- Sound Cue Editor, for sequencing audio events and adjusting sound properties.
- Post-process Editor, for chaining together after-effects such as motion blur and depth of field.
- A powerful Object Browser for organizing game assets of all types, including a robust Content Tagging system.
- Scene Manager with ample geometry and lighting statistics to help your teams optimize scene complexity and performance.
- Reference Graph viewer keeps track of your level’s asset dependencies automatically.
- Asset workflow:
- Plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and SoftImage
XSI allow for importing models with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, skeleton structure, animation data, smoothing groups and materials names.
- Built-in support for importing meshes and animations from COLLADA files.
- Fully integrated source control, so that artists and level designers can check out content packages, modify, and check in from within the editor.
- All of the other features you'd expect from the leading game content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, object grouping, auto-save features, grid controls,
copy-and-paste, customizable viewport configurations, keyboard and color customization, etc.
- Every Unreal Engine license includes the right to redistribute UnrealEd publicly, enabling teams to release the content creation tools along with their game to the mod community.
Mod support has been a major factor behind the success of many prominent PC games today, and we anticipate that support for PC-based mod development may be a significant factor in future
console games as well.
     
     
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