Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Setting up our own test project


As we did with our last chapter, we're going to start out simply by creating a clean project with the following settings:

  1. Blank blueprint template
  2. Mobile/tablet hardware target
  3. Scalable 3D or 2D graphics target
  4. No Starter Content

As usual, here's our project settings cheat sheet:

  1. Engine | Rendering | Forward Renderer | Forward Shading: True
  2. EngineRendering | Default Settings | Ambient Occlusion Static Fraction: False
  3. Engine | Rendering | Default SettingsAnti-Aliasing Method: MSAA
  4. Engine | Rendering | VRInstanced Stereo: True
  5. Engine | Rendering | VRRound Robin Occlusion Queries: True

 

We're going to set one value differently, however, for this test because we're going to be working mostly in the flat screen to simplify learning this challenging topic:

  • Project | Description | SettingsStart in VR: False

Allow the project to restart once all these settings have been set.

Adding an environment

Let's give ourselves some environment assets to play with so we're not...