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 an object we can pick up


We'll begin by making a few objects we can pick up. Let's start with a simple cube:

  1. Right-click in your project's Blueprints directory in your content browser and select Create Basic AssetBlueprint Class.
  2. This time, instead of selecting one of the common classes as its parent class, expand the All Classes entry at the bottom of the Pick Parent Class dialog.
  1. Select Static Mesh Actor:
  1. Name it BP_PickupCube.
  2. Open up BP_PickupCube.

You can see that it inherited a Static Mesh Component.

Note

We could just as easily have created an Actor Blueprint and added a Static Mesh component, but it's a good idea to get in the habit of choosing your parent classes appropriately when you're building a new asset. Don't reinvent things if you don't have to.

  1. Set the Static Mesh property of Static Mesh Component to Engine Content/Basic Shapes/Cube1.
  2. Set its Scale to 0.2, 0.2, 0.2.
  3. Set its Materials | Element 0 to Content/SoulCity/Environment/Materials/Props/MI_Glow. (Or anything else...