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

Optimizing scenes for VR


Now that we've spoken a fair bit about editing scenes using VR Mode, let's talk about an absolutely crucial topic in VR development – maintaining an acceptable frame rate.

We've discussed the paramount importance of maintaining frame rate in virtual reality several times before. It's critical, and it's challenging to do. In the remainder of this chapter, we're going to talk about things that you can do to speed up your scenes and to find out what's preventing them from running faster.

Testing your current performance

The first thing you need to do when assessing your scene's performance is to find out how fast you're currently running. We're going to look at a few commands we can use for this.

From within the editor, click on the ` (backtick) key. It's to the left of the 1 key on your keyboard, above the Tab key. A console entry box will appear:

A wide range of console commands can be entered here. We're going to talk about those you're most likely to use as you optimize...