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 Unreal Engine


If you're going to develop VR applications using Unreal Engine, the first thing you'll need, of course, is the engine. Let's walk through the process of setting it up.

What it costs

A natural question to start with when considering Unreal Engine is what it costs. The news here is good. Unreal Engine is free to download and use, and if you use it commercially, the terms are reasonable.

When you download the engine, you'll be asked to agree to one of two license agreements, depending on what you're going to be using it for. If you're a game developer and you make a game or application using Unreal and sell it, you'll pay a 5% royalty on gross sales over $3,000 per calendar quarter. If you don't sell your game or app, or it earns less than that per quarter, Unreal is free to use.

 

If you're using Unreal for something that isn't intended to be sold to the public (training simulations, architectural visualization, or anything else), Unreal is entirely free under the terms...