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


Congratulations! We covered a lot of ground. In this chapter. We went through the process of creating a starting VR project and set it up properly to run well on the target hardware. We learned how to decide what settings to use when setting up a new project for VR, and how to find our way around inside an Unreal project directory. We also learned about a number of important Unreal Engine features used in VR development:

  • Instanced Stereo
  • Round Robin Occlusions
  • Forward Shading
  • Multisampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) 
  • [Mobile] Mobile Multi-View
  • [Mobile] Monoscopic Far Field Rendering

We learned how to migrate content from one project to another, and how to clean up our Content directory once it arrives.

Finally, we set up a basic VR pawn and set up a game mode to instruct the map to load it. In working with the pawn, we learned about how we can use components to build complex objects out of simple parts, adding a camera and tracked motion controllers. Finally, we set up the first elements of our...