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


We did quite a lot in this chapter.

We learned how to set up and refine a navigation mesh in our scene and how to find and fix collision problems with objects in our scene. We learned how to set up input actions and use them to move our player character around, and perhaps most importantly, we learned Kent Beck's mantra for software development: Make it work, make it right, make it fast, and learned what it means to follow it as we pursue iterative development. We're going to revisit this a lot. It's a secret to effective software development.

That was a lot of work. The exercises in this chapter covered a lot of ground, but should have left you with a decent sense of how the parts fit together when setting up a player pawn and a locomotion system.

Now that we've given our pawn feet, in the next chapter, we're going to give it hands. We'll learn how to use motion controllers to point, grip, and interact with objects in the world. We'll also build on what we've learned about setting...