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

Addressing frame rate problems


Now that we've learned a bit about how to find problems in your scene, let's talk a bit about what to do about them.

Cleaning up Blueprint Tick events

If you're seeing high numbers on your CPU, one of the first culprits you want to look for is any Blueprint doing operations on the Tick event. This is an extremely common culprit. Remember that Tick events happen every single frame, so if you're doing a lot of work on your Tick, you're impacting every single frame you need to draw. Look for ways to spread this work out over multiple frames, or to avoid using the Tick altogether and use events to make objects change their state only when something changes.

Managing skeletal animations

If you have a lot of skeletal meshes animating, make sure they don't have a ridiculous number of bones in their skeletons, and make sure they're not using a ton of blend space animations. It's a much better practice to use skeletal mesh Level of Detail (LOD) to include fine details only...