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

Using VRExpansion classes


We're going to use this project both as a review of the things we need to do when we set up a scene for VR and as an introduction to the VRExpansion classes.

Adding navigation

The first thing we're going to need to do, of course, now that we have our environment, is set it up with a nav mesh so we'll have the option to use teleport locomotion and so AI characters can navigate through it.

Begin by checking your collision environment:

  1. Hit Alt + C (or the from the viewport, Show | Collision) to visualize your collision environment and make sure it looks sensible.

The collision here looks good, so let's add a Nav Mesh Bounds Volume to the scene.

  1. Drag a Nav Mesh Bounds Volume into the scene and scale it to encompass the areas where you want your player to be able to navigate.
  2. The following values work reasonably well: Location (X= -11420.0, Y= -3790.0, Z= -490.0), and Scale (X= 100.0, Y= 160.0, Z= 20.0).

Remember that you can make your life easier when setting up volumes by...