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

Summary


This chapter involved a bit more theory than other chapters have, and it's entirely fine if a good chunk of it is still sinking in.

In this chapter, we talked a fair bit about Unreal's client-server architecture, and which objects live in which domains. It's important to get a good working knowledge of this structure in place. We also learned a bit about how information and events move between machines via replication and remote procedure calls.

It's our hope that this chapter has given you a good foundation on which to stand as you dig into networking and really explore how it works. Be patient with yourself and take time to experiment.

We've now reached the point where we've covered a huge range of things you need to know to develop VR using Unreal Engine. Next, we're going to take a look at a few tools and plugins that can greatly accelerate your work in VR. With what you've learned so far in this book, you should be ready to dig through them and understand how they can help you...