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

Creating a new project


All right, let's start creating!

The first thing we need to do is create a new project. We created a few quick throwaway projects in the previous chapter just to make sure everything was working, but now we're ready to begin building for real.

Open your Epic Games Launcher if it isn't already open, head to the Library tab, and where you see your Engine Versions, hit Launch on your most current engine version. (You can do this from the Launch button on the left side of the launcher as well.)

The Unreal Project Browser will appear. Select the New Project tab, and let's select the Blueprint tab and the Blank template to create an empty Blueprint project.

Note

Templates are very useful starting points for Unreal projects. They contain simple and useful working foundations of many game types, and much of the time when you're starting a new project, you'll want to use them. We're beginning with a blank project here so you can see each element as it goes in. You'll probably most...