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

Implementing the Pickup and Drop functions


Now that we've added this interface to the BP_PickupCube class, we can implement the functions we declared in that interface in our event graph. Let's get started:

  1. In your Event Graph, right-click and select Event Pickup to create a Pick up event. This event exists on this Blueprint class now because we've attached an interface that declares it. You'll see that the event indicates that it's an interface event from BPI_PickupActor.
  2. Create a Drop event in the same way.

Now that we've created handlers for the two events coming from our interface, let's make them work.

When this object is picked up, we want to turn off its physics simulation so that it doesn't fall out of our hand, and we want to attach it to a scene component on the hand that's picking it up.

  1. Drag a reference to the Static Mesh Component onto the Event Graph.
  2. Call Set Simulate Physics on it, setting Simulate to False.
  3. Right-click in the graph and select Get Root Component.
  4. Drag a connector...